“I'll say good day to you, pardner—and to—you”—to the woman, and without a word more he was galloping off down the trail toward Las Vegas. | “I guess I was darn lucky to get rid of that horse,” the homesteader remarked, as he gazed after the Bad Man. The woman said nothing. She only wondered. MOLLIE DARLING OUT of the warm distance came the song: “Do you love me, Mollie darling? Say you love none else but me—” The man seated in the cabin door raised a battered face and listened, as down the trail came the singer and the song. “Mollie, sweetest, fairest, dearest; Look up, darling, tell me this. Do you love me, Mollie darling? Let your answer be a kiss!” The dog at the man's feet cocked his head knowingly on one side and seemed to listen, too. The man addressed the dog. “Duffer, that's a right sweet old song, ain't it?—a right plaintive air. When you're fifty odd, Duffer, them old songs dig holes in your memory.” As he spoke he gently caressed the dog. It was yellow and palpably of uncertain breed, but just as palpably of distinguished social qualities. “Duffer, I'll bet you what you like he ain't fifty,—and that his Mollie's within safe walking distance!” Around a turn in the trail, a winding path that led up and up, and from behind a big boulder, came the singer in blue work-stained overalls and blouse. He swung a tin dinner pail with one hand and his cap with the other. His years were plainly a scanty half of fifty. Catching sight of the man in the cabin door, he paused, while the song died abruptly on his lips. “Hullo!” he said. “Evening,” responded the man. Middle age had put its stamp upon him; hard-lived years apparently, for he was lean and muscular, with the brown skin of perpetual sunburn. A long scar slashed the bridge of his beak-like nose and halved a shaggy iron-gray eyebrow with a white welt. The eye beneath was fixed and staring, yet it served to mitigate and soften the somewhat severe expression that lurked across the way, as it were, on the other side of his face; for his good eye was dark and piercing, and held a deep spark. Duffer, wagging his tail, investigated the newcomer. He sniffed at the blue overalls that kept the rancid odor of smoke and oil and machinery. The young man clapped his cap on his thick mop of black curls, opened his dinner pail and found a crust. “Think he'd like this?” he asked of the dog's master, who nodded. Duffer made short work of the crust, and then, wise and inquiring, nosed the bottom of the dinner pail. “What do you call this place?” inquired the elder man. There were sixteen houses on the bench below. “Sunset,—Sunset Limited, some of us calls it. Say, Alvarado's knocked the spots out of us,—so's Last Pan, so's Buffalo Bend. Sunset Limited,—yes, sir, and that ain't no joke either!” “Quiet?”