"I took the money off you so if they got us I could take the blame and let you off. I can take the blame without hurting my reputation, so don't worry. I'm not doing this so much for your sake as for your kid brother and your sister. I figure you'd sort of caught on when I heard they hadn't located my horse. That was a good turn. Do me another by getting some sense. There's plenty of us fellows that's quite capable to furnish the bad examples. "RATHBURN." The girl was crying softly with an arm about her brother's neck when he finished reading. "What--what are you going to do, Eddie?" she sobbed. "I'm goin' to irrigate!" said Ed Lamy with a new note in his voice. "I'm goin' to build a sure-enough ranch for us with this piece of paper for a corner stone!" Dawn was breaking over the mountains, strewing the gleaming peaks with warm rosettes of color. A clear sky, as deep and blue as any sea, arched its canopy above. Virgin stands of pine and fir marched up the steep slopes to fling their banners of green against the snow. Silver ribbons of streams laughed in the welcome sunlight. In a rock-walled gulch, far above the head of Sunrise Canon, a fire was burning, its thin smoke streamer riding on a vagrant breeze. Near by lay a dun-colored horse on its side, tied fast. A man was squatting by the blaze. "I hate to have to do this, old hoss," the man crooned; "but we've got to change the pattern of that CC2 brand if we want to stick together, an' I reckon we want to stick." He thrust the running iron deeper into the glowing coals. CHAPTER XIV THE WITNESS The morning was hardly two hours old, and the crisp air was stinging sweet with the tang of pine and fir, as Rathburn rode jauntily down the trail on the eastern slope of the divide and drew rein on the crest of a high ridge. As he looked below he whistled softly. "Juniper, hoss, there's folks down there plying a nefarious trade, a plumb dangerous trade," he mused, digging for the tobacco and brown papers in the pocket of his shirt. "I reckon they're carrying on in direct defiance of the law, hoss." The dun-colored mustang tossed his head impatiently, but his master ignored the animal's fretful desire to be off and dallied with tobacco and paper, fashioning a cigarette, lighting it, breathing thin smoke as his gray eyes squinted appraisingly at the scene below. Winding down into the foothills, in striking contrast to the dim trails higher up, was a well-used road. It evidently led from the saffron-tinted dump and gray buildings of a mine which showed on the side of a big, bald mountain to southward. At a point almost directly below the ridge where the man and horse stood, it crossed a small hogback and descended a steep slope between lines of jack pines, disappearing in the timber farther down.