"He will not a-goed. I told to heem--whee!" Maggie clamped her hands to her back as if somebody had caught her in a ticklish spot, as she squealed, and jumped into the room where the grand duke of the cattlemen's nobility was taking his refreshment. Chadron had returned to his meal after ordering her to send his visitor to the barn. He was swabbing his knife in the fold of a pancake when Maggie made that frightful, shivering exclamation and jumped aside out of the door. Now he looked up to reprove her, and met the smoky eyes of Mark Thorn peering in from the kitchen. "What're you doin' around here, you old--come in--shut that door! Git him some breakfast," he ordered, turning to Maggie. Maggie hung back a moment, until Thorn had come into the room, then she shot into the kitchen like a cat through a fence, and slammed the door behind her. "What in the hell do you mean by comin' around here?" Chadron demanded angrily. "Didn't I tell you never to come here? you blink-eyed old snag-shin!" "You told me," Thorn admitted, putting his rifle down across a chair, drawing another to the table, and seating himself in readiness for the coming meal. "Then what'd you sneak--" "News," said Thorn, in his brief way. "Which news?" Chadron brightened hopefully, his implements, clamped in his hairy fists, inviting the first bolt from the heavens. "I got him last night." "You got--_him?_" Chadron lifted himself from his chair on his bent legs in the excitement of the news. "And I'm through with this job. I've come to cash in, and quit." "The hell you say!" "I'm gittin' too old for this kind of work. That feller chased me around till my tongue was hangin' out so fur I stepped on it. I tell you he was--" "How did you do it?" Thorn looked at him with a scowl. "Well, I never used a club on a man yit," he said. "Where did it happen at?" "Up there at his place. He'd been chasin' me for two days, and when he went back--after grub, I reckon--I doubled on him. Just as he went in the door I got him. I left him with his damn feet stickin' out like a shoemaker's sign." "How fur was you off from him, Mark?" "Fifty yards, more 'r less." "Did you go over to him to see if he was finished, or just creased?" "I never creased a man in my life!" Thorn was indignant over the imputation. Chadron shook his head, in doubt, in discredit, in gloomy disbelief. "If you didn't go up to him and turn him over and look at the whites of his eyes, you ain't sure," he protested. "That man's as slippery as wet leather--he's fooled more than one that thought they had him, and I'll bet you two bits he's fooled you." "Go and see, and settle it yourself, then," Thorn proposed, in surly humor.