"Like hell you will," snarled Pecos, throwing out his chin. He scowled back at the irate officer, cast a baleful glance at the IC punchers, and mounted from the far side of his horse, but when he rode away Ike Crittenden went out behind the corral and laughed until he choked. After all the trouble this man Dalhart had made him, just to think of him locking horns with Boone Morgan! And all from his crazy reading of the _Voice of Reason_! The memory of his own enforced tax-paying fell away from him like a dream at the thought of Pecos Dalhart putting up a fight against the sheriff of Geronimo County, and on the strength of it he took a couple of drinks and was good-natured for a week. If Pecos had had some self-appointed critic to point out just how foolish he was he might have seen a new light, gathered up about twenty head of Monkey-wrench steers and sold them to pay his taxes; but his only recourse in this extremity was to the _Voice of Reason_, and whatever its other good qualities are, that journal has never been accused of preaching moderation and reason. It was war to the knife with Pecos, from the jump, and the day after his return he took his carbine, his cigarette makings, and the last _Voice of Reason_ and went up the trail to lie in wait for Boone Morgan. The country around Lost Dog Cañon is mostly set on edge and the entrance to the valley is through a narrow and crooked ravine, filled with bowlders and faced with sun-blackened sandstone rocks, many of which, from some fracture of their weathered surface, are pock-marked with giant "wind-holes." Into one of these natural pockets, from the shelter of which a single man could stand off a regiment, Pecos hoisted himself with the dawn, and he did not leave it again till dark. As the wind came up and, sucking in through the opening, hollowed out each day its little more, the loose sand from the soft walls blew into Pecos's eyes and he gave up his fervid reading; but except for that and for the times when from the blackness of his cavern he searched the narrow trail for his enemies, he pored over the _Voice of Reason_ as a Christian martyr might brood over his Bible. It was his religion, linked with that far more ancient religion of revenge, and if Boone Morgan or any other deputy tax collector had broken in upon his reveries they certainly would have stopped something worse than a bouncing stone.