Joel Fenno had made the last few rods of the distance between the gap and the indented niche in something like record time; his stiff muscles stirred to incredible power by the imminent danger of his chum. The others from the Dos Hermanos ranch, Royce Mack among them, were still standing stupefied and inert. Joel struck up the pistol arm and in the same move banged his own full weight against the broad back of the cattleman. The result was a lamentable miss; and the saving of the collie’s life. The impact and the heavy-caliber pistol’s own recoil, knocked the gun from Hibben’s hand. Chris turned, cursing. His left elbow caught Fenno in the chest and knocked the little old rancher flat. Then Hibben stooped to regain the pistol. But he was met and driven backward by a flamingly wrathful mass of fur and whalebone strength that smote him amidships, in an effort to seize his throat. Treve, seeing his loved master knocked down, had left his post beside the dead sheep and launched himself like a vengeful avalanche upon Joel’s assailant. Here lay his first duty; and he wasted no time in fulfilling it. Hibben staggered backward, clawing at the furious brute which sought to rend his throat. In the same instant, a scream of mortal terror from Joel Fenno was taken up by the far-off group at the gap. At the sound, Treve forsook his prey and spun about to face the slowly rising Joel. Hibben, too, forgot his own danger, in the stress of that shriek; and turned to look. The drouth and the eternal smell of smoke had gotten on the nerves of the three hundred cattle pastured in the field. To-day, the inrush of the strange and repellent-smelling grayish creatures upon their territory had agonized those raw nerves to frenzy. On top of all this, the scent of fresh-spilled blood had the effect that so often it has on overwrought range cattle. Something like fifty white-fronted Hereford steers suddenly lowered their horns and, by common consent, charged that blood-reek. In other words, Joel Fenno, in trying to get up, had seen coming toward the alcove-space a tumble of lowered heads and express-train red bodies. Though he was a sheepman, he knew what a cattle charge meant. And he screamed horrified warning to his fellow-human in that death-trap. Old cattleman though he was, Chris Hibben stood frozen to stone at the sight. Then he glanced toward the alcove fence behind them. Seven feet of close-meshed barbed wire--coyote-proof, bull-tight, horse-high. No man might hope to scale so bristling a stockade. Hibben himself had ordained that fence in the days when this end of the range had been given up to calves, and when wolves and rustlers abounded.