Parenthesis threw a tin cup at Fresno, who dodged it. Punching the dough viciously, he said: "Darn this housekeepin'. Gets a feller's hands all rough,--it's enough to spile the disposition of a saint." His soliloquy was interrupted by Buck McKee riding up to the wagon from Lazy K outfit, which was camping a mile below them. "Hello, Cookie! How goes it?" was his greeting. "You wind it up, and it goes eight days." Parenthesis bellowed, his temper fast reaching the breaking-point. "Jack Payson ain't back yet?" Buck asked, paying no attention to the bad humor of Parenthesis. "Not that I knows on." The cook rolled the dough with elaborate care. "Nor Hoover?" "Ain't seen him," he replied curtly. "Well, they ain't comin' back, either. They pulled it off pretty slick on us fellers. Hoover he lets Payson go and makes a bluff at chasin' after him. Then they gets off somewhere, splits up the money, and gives us the laugh." Parenthesis turned on him in anger and shouted: "'I'll bet my outfit against a pair of green socks either one of 'em or both will be back here before this round-up is over." "You will, eh?" snarled Buck. "Well, we're just waitin' for 'em. We'll swing Payson so high he'll look like a buzzard, and as for Hoover--well, he's served his last term as sheriff in this yere county, you hear me shouting." McKee cut his pony with his quirt and dashed away in time to escape an unwelcome encounter with several members of the Sweetwater outfit who were riding back to camp. "S-t-a-y with him, Bud, s-t-a-y with him," shouted Parenthesis, as the first of the cowboys pitched on a bucking horse past the chuck-wagon, the rider using quirt and spurs until he got the bronco into a lope. The other boys followed, each cayuse apparently inventing some new sort of deviltry. For two weeks before the round-up the outfit had been busting broncos at the home ranch. Each morning at dawn they started, working until the heat of the day forced them to rest. When the temperature crawls to 104 in the shade, and the alkali-dust is so thick in the corral that the hoofs raise a cloud in which horses can hide themselves twenty feet away, when eyes smart and the tongue aches in the parched mouth, it becomes almost impossible to handle yourself, let alone a kicking, struggling bronco. As one day is like another, and one horse differs from another only in the order of his tricks to avoid the rope and the saddle, a glimpse of the horsemanship of Bud Lane and his fellows will serve as a general picture of life on any Western ranch. The breaking of the ponies was the work of Bud Lane, who, through the influence of Polly, had broken with McKee and returned to work on Sweetwater Ranch in order to assist Echo, with whom he had become reconciled on discovering that she had been loyal to his brother even to the extent of sending her husband into the desert to bring Dick back.