Rob, seeing there was no use arguing, paid over the money, in exchange for which they had received three greasy plates of soup, three portions of ragged, overdone bull beef, and three slabs of raisin pie, together with three cups of muddy, inky coffee. But a sudden impulse of curiosity gripped him. "Say, what's the twenty-five cents extra all round for?" he asked. "Fer your ponies," rejoined the landlord, more miserably than ever. He seemed to be on the point of bursting into tears. "Ponies!" gasped Rob. "We haven't got any." "Never mind, it's a rule of the house," said the landlord, as if that settled the matter; "and if you ain't got any ponies it ain't my fault, is it?" There was no answering this sort of logic, and the boys strolled out to the porch to see if they could sight any trace of Harry Harkness. There was no sign of him, however, and after a prolonged period of gazing across the blazing desert, the boys sank back in three of the big rockers that stood in a row on the porch. It was dull, sitting there in the intense heat and drowsy silence, broken only at long intervals by the clatter of a pony's hoofs as some cow-puncher ambled by at an easy lope. A loud snore from Tubby soon proclaimed that he was off, and Merritt and Rob were about to follow him into the land of dreams, when there came a sudden interruption. Rob felt his shoulder roughly seized from behind, and a harsh, mandatory voice addressed him: "Say, that's my chair you're sitting in. You'll have to get out." The boy turned and saw Clark Jennings glaring at him. Close beside him, with a grin on his face, was Jess Randell. "Even supposing it is your chair," said Rob, "you can ask me for it like a gentleman,--then," he added to himself, "I'll think over giving it to you." "Oh, I guess you think you're a mighty fine gentleman?" "I hope I am one, yes." "Well, out here gentlemen have to fight for their title. Are you going to give me that chair?" "As you are no more a guest of this hotel than I am, I shall sit here till I get ready to get up." "Then I'll have to help you out----Ouch!" The remark and the exclamation came close together. Clark Jennings had bent forward as he spoke, and roughly laid hold of Rob to pull him from the chair by main force. As he did so, however, Rob had suddenly changed from a passive, rather sleepy boy, to a bundle of steel springs full of fight. Clark Jennings, as he laid hold of Rob, had felt himself hurled backward. Unable to check his impetus, he had landed against the wall of the hotel with a force which caused him to give vent to the exclamation recorded. "Look out, tenderfoot, he'll kill yer," warned the melancholy landlord from the window of the office, where he had been entering in a greasy book the extortion practiced on the boys. Several cow-punchers awoke to interest at the same time as Tubby and Merritt began to realize what was happening.