Slade favored him with a long stare which Lanky bore with unconcern, smiling back at him pleasantly. "I've got my little piece memorized," Evans said; "and in parting let me remark that Cal Harris will prove a new sort of a victim for you to work on. If you tie into him he'll tear down your meat-house." He turned his horse and rode back to the herd. "I'll play your own game," the girl told Slade. "If anything happens to another man who is riding for me and I have any reason to even suspect you were at the bottom of it I'll swear that I saw you do the thing yourself. The Three Bar is the only outfit with a clean enough record to drag anything up for an airing before the courts without taking a chance. This rule of every man for himself won't hold good with me." She moved toward the wagon and Slade kept pace with her, leading his horse. There was no sign of life around the wagon and the jerky movement of a hat, barely visible through the tips of the sage, indicated that Waddles was washing out some clothing at the creek bank fifty yards away. Slade leaned against the hind wheel on the far side from the herd and looked down at her. "You're a real woman, Billie," he said. "You better throw in with a real man--me--and we'll own this country. I'll run the Three Bar on ten thousand head whenever you say the word." "I'd rather see it on half as many through my own efforts," she said. "And some day I will." "Some day you'll see it my way," he prophesied. "I know you better than any other man. You want an outfit of your own--and if the Three Bar gets crowded out you'll go to the man that can give you one in its place. That will be me. Some day we'll trade." "Some day--right soon--you'll trade your present holdings for a nice little range in hell," a voice said in Slade's ear and at the same instant two huge paws were thrust from the little window of the cook-wagon and clamped on his arms above the crook of his elbows. Slade was a powerful man but he was an infant in the grip of the two great hands that raised him clear of the ground and shook him before he was slammed down on his face ten feet away by a straight-arm thrust. His deadly temper flared and the swift move for his gun was simultaneous with the twist which brought him to his feet, but his hand fell away from the butt of it as he looked into the twin muzzles of a sawed-off shotgun which menaced him from the window. It occurred to him that the nighthawk must have been restless and had elected to wash at the creek bank instead of indulging in sleep, thus accounting for the bobbing hat he had seen, for assuredly it did not belong to the cook, as he had surmised. The face behind the gun was the face of Waddles. "I'm about to touch off a pound of shot if you go acting up," Waddles said. "Any more talk like you was just handing out and you'll get smeared here and there." "Are you running the Three Bar?" Slade asked.