“Half-breed.  There’s the difference, and besides the Rainbow ain’t lived in a house since she left the convent.  She lives in a tepee same as her uncle and aunties.”

“I don’t care,” defended Molly, straightening on her knees to survey her garden.  “Every single plant in my garden except the pink geraniums is wild.  Look at those thimble-berry bushes round the spring, and the blue camass along the brook, and the squaw bushes round the house, and the squaw grass and pussy paws back of the clothes-lines.  Some I transplanted, the rest I grew from seeds.  And where will you find a better-looking garden?”

Racey sagged back on his heels and stared critically about him.

“Yeah,” he drawled, nodding a slow head, “they do look pretty good.  Got to give you lots of credit.  But those squaw bushes now—­” He broke off, grinning.

“Oh, of course, you provoking thing!” cried she, irately.  “Might know you’d pick on those squaw bushes.  It is a mite too shady for ’em where they are, but still they’re doing pretty well, considering.  I’m satisfied—­What’s that?”

“That” was a horseman appearing suddenly among the cottonwoods that belted with a scattering grove the garden and the spring.  The horseman was Lanpher, manager of the 88 ranch.  He was followed by another rider, a lean, swarthy individual with a smooth-shaven, saturnine face.  Racey knew the latter by sight and reputation.  The man was one Skeel and rejoiced in the nick-name of “Alicran.”  The furtive scorpion whose sting is death is not indigenous to the territory, but Mr. Skeel had gained the appellation in New Mexico, a region where the tail-bearing insect may be found, and when the man left the Border for the Border’s good the name left with him.

“Oh, lookout!  The bushes!  The bushes!  Don’t trample my thimble-berries!”

But Lanpher, heeding not at all Molly’s cries of warning, spurred his sweating horse through the thimble-berry growth, breaking down three shrubs, and splashed cat-a-corneredly across the spring, the brook, and several rows of flowers.

The garden looked as if a miniature cyclone had passed that way.

Midway across the garden Lanpher’s horse halted—­halted because a flying figure in chaps had appeared from nowhere and seized it by the rein.  But the horse did more than halt.  In obedience to a powerful jerk administered by the man in chaps the horse pivoted on its forelegs and slid its rider out of the saddle and deposited him a-sprawl and face downward among the flowers.

Lanpher arose, snarling, to face a levelled sixshooter.  It did not signify that Racey had not drawn the weapon.  He was perfectly capable of shooting through the bottom of his holster and Lanpher knew it.  And Racey knew that he knew it.

“Get out of this garden!” ordered Racey.  “Take yore friend with you,” he added, tossing the horse’s bridle to Lanpher.  “And if I were you I’d walk a heap careful between the rows.  I just wouldn’t go a-busting any more of these posies.”