He stepped back a little, away from the table, his teeth showing in a mocking grin. Then he looked down at the hat which he still held in his hand--Dunlavey's hat. He laughed. "Why, I'm cert'nly impolite!" he said insinuatingly. "Here you've been wantin' to go an' I've been keepin' your hat!" He dumped the ballots upon the table and passed the hat to Dunlavey. Without a word Dunlavey took it, jerking it savagely, placed it on his head, and strode to the door, stepping down into the street. There was a short silence. Then Ten Spot turned and looked at Hollis, his face wreathed in a broad grin. "I reckon you-all think you know somethin' about handlin' the law," he said, "but your little Ten Spot ain't exactly the measliest card in the deck! We'll do our votin' now." A quarter of an hour later, after Ten Spot and his friends had cast their ballots and Watkins had been forced to make out a certificate of nomination,--which reposed safely in Ben Allen's inside pocket--the kerosene lights were extinguished and the men filed out. Hollis and Ten Spot were the last to leave. As they stood for a moment on the threshold of the doorway Hollis seized Ten Spot's hand and gripped it heartily. "I want to thank you, my friend," he said earnestly. Ten Spot jerked his hand away. "Aw, hell!" he said as they sought the darkness of the street, "I ain't mushin' none. But," he added, as a concession to his feelings, "I reckon to know a white man when I see one!" CHAPTER XXVI AUTUMN AND THE GODS It was Sunday afternoon and a hazy, golden, late September sun was swimming lazily in the blue arc of sky, flooding the lower gallery of the Circle Bar ranchhouse, but not reaching a secluded nook in which sat Hollis and Nellie Hazelton. Mrs. Norton was somewhere in the house and Norton had gone down to the bunkhouse for a talk with the men--Hollis and Nellie could see him, sitting on a bench in the shade of the eaves, the other men gathered about him. Below the broad level that stretched away from the ranchhouse sank the big basin, sweeping away to the mountains. Miles into the distance the Circle Bar cattle could be seen--moving dots in the center of a great, green bowl. To the right Razor-Back ridge loomed its bald crest upward with no verdure saving the fringe of shrubbery at its base; to the left stretched a vast plain that met the distant horizon that stretched an interminable distance behind the cottonwood. Except for the moving dots there was a total absence of life and movement in the big basin. It spread in its wide, gradual, downward slope, bathed in the yellow sunshine of the new, mellow season, peacefully slumberous, infinitely beautiful.