"You're playing one game and I'm playing mine," Harris said. "You're in the saddle now--like you have been once or twice before. But you know that the sentiment of a community reverses almost overnight. You've stepped out just ahead of a clean-up a time or two in the past. You know how it goes--your friends drop off like you had the plague. Every man's out after your scalp. I've got a hard bunch of terriers over at the Three Bar and you couldn't raid us without a battle big enough to go down in history as the Three Bar war. Either way you'd lose for it would stir folks up--and when they're stirred you're through. Do you remember what Al Moody did up on the Gallatin and what old Con Ristine sprung on the Nations Trail? That will happen again right here." The two men were leaning toward each other, elbows resting on the table. Harper relaxed and leaned back comfortably in his chair as he twisted a smoke. Evans propped his feet on the table and Harris hung one knee over the arm of his chair. The men at the bar knew that some crisis had been safely passed. "You talk as if I was running an outfit of my own and had a bunch of riders that could swarm down on you," Harper objected. "I don't even run a brand of my own or have one man riding for me." "The wild bunch is riding for you," Harris stated. "Suppose that was true," Harper said. "Then what?" "In one country after the next they've hit the toboggan whenever they got to feeling too strong. If you line up against me that time has come again. If I get potted from the brush I've hedged it so that those boys that filed over there won't be left in the lurch. There'll be a reward of a thousand dollars hung up for the scalp of each of fifteen men whose names I gathered while I was prowling round--reliable men to carry on what I've begun; and marshals thicker than flies to protect the homestead filings on the Three Bar." "Then it might be bad policy to bushwhack you," Harper observed. "You can go your own gait," Harris said. "As long as you lay off Three Bar cows. You invited me one time to come down to your hangout in the Breaks. I won't ever make that visit unless you call on the Three Bar first; then, just out of politeness, I'll ride over at the head of a hundred men." "Then it don't look as if we'd get anywhere, visiting back and forth," Harper said. "Now don't think I'm throwing a bluff or threatening; I'm just telling you. You could recite a number of things that could happen to me in return--all of 'em true. I'm just counting that you've got brains and can see it's not going to help either one of us to get lined up wrong. What do you say--shall we call it hands off between the Three Bar and you?"