"I’m givin’ you somethin’ to think about!" retorted Henry, slowly arising and slowly leaning forward on the table. "You don’t want to stop thinkin’ about it, neither--unless you want to join th’ dead uns on Boot Hill. I said that range is fenced--_you keep off_!" Tommy, alert as a coiled snake now, watched the angry man while he considered. A fenced range. He was to keep off. "I ain’t gettin’ th’ drift of that," he said, slowly. "Any reason why you shouldn’t talk so I’ll know what yo’re meanin’?" "Yo’re dumb as h--l, ain’t you?" sneered Henry, his voice rising shrilly and the little, close-set eyes beginning to flame. "I wouldn’t have nobody say you wasn’t warned plain. I’m tellin’ you for th’ last time, to do yore courtin’ somewhere else! I’m claimin’ that Saunder gal. Keep away, that’s all!" Tommy went a little white around his stiffening lips. When his words came they sounded the spirit of the C Bar, but where they came from he did not know; perhaps he had heard them or read them somewhere. Certainly they did not by right belong to his direct method of conveying thought. He knew Henry Williams, his baseness, his petty villainies, his bestial nature. The picture of Jane, innocent and sweet, came to him and made a contrast which sickened him. Looking straight into Henry’s eyes his voice rasped its insulting, deadly reply. "It’s bad enough for a coyote like me to admire a rose; but I’m d--d if any polecat’s goin’ to pluck it!" Before the words were all spoken and before either of the disputants could move they heard the startling crash of a gun and instinctively glanced toward the sound. They saw Bud Haines, his smoking revolver forced slowly up behind his back, higher and higher, the gun wrist gripped in the sinewy fingers of Tex Jones, whose right hand held his own Colt at his hip, the deadly muzzle covering the two in front of the bar, without a tremble of its steely barrel. His gripping fingers kept on twisting, while one knee held the killer from writhing sidewise to escape the grip of the punishing bending of the imprisoned arm. Slowly the tortured muscles grew numb, slowly beads of perspiration stood out on the killer’s forehead, and as his throbbing elbow neared the snapping point, he gasped, released his hold on the Colt and then went spinning across the room from the power of his captor’s whirling shove. When he stopped he froze in his tracks, for Tex carelessly held two guns now, the captured weapon covering its owner.