CHAPTER XXVI

“THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON”

“Speakin’ of hard cattlemen,” he said, “I could maybe tell you a few things, son.”

“No doubt of it,” smiled Anthony.  “I presume it would take a very hard man to handle this crowd.”

“Fairly hard,” nodded the redoubtable Lawlor, “but they ain’t nothin’ to the men that used to ride the range in the old days.”

“No?”

“Nope.  One of them men—­why, he’d eat a dozen like Kilrain and think nothin’ of it.  Them was the sort I learned to ride the range with.”

“I’ve heard something about a fight which you and John Bard had against the Piotto gang.  Care to tell me anything of it?”

Lawlor lolled easily back in his chair and balanced a second large drink between thumb and forefinger.

“There ain’t no harm in talk, son; sure I’ll tell you about it.  What d’you want to know?”

“The way Bard fought—­the way you both fought.”

“Lemme see.”

He closed his eyes like one who strives to recollect; he was, in fact, carefully recalling the skeleton of facts which Drew had told him earlier in the day.

“Six months, me and Bard had been trailin’ Piotto, damn his old soul!  Bard—­he’d of quit cold a couple of times, but I kept him at it.”

“John Bard would have quit?” asked Anthony softly.

“Sure.  He was a big man, was Bard, but he didn’t have none too much endurance.”

“Go on,” nodded Anthony.

“Six months, I say, we was ridin’ day and night and wearin’ out a hoss about every week of that time.  Then we got jest a hint from a bartender that maybe the Piottos was nearby in that section.

“It didn’t need no more than a hint for us to get busy on the trail.  We hit a circle through the mountains—­it was over near Twin Rivers where the ground ain’t got a level stretch of a hundred yards in a whole day’s ridin’.  And along about evenin’ of the second day we come to the house of Tom Shaw, a squatter.

“Bard would of passed the house up, because he knew Shaw and said there wasn’t nothin’ crooked about him, but I didn’t trust nobody in them days—­and I ain’t changed a pile since.”

“That,” remarked Anthony, “is an example I think I shall follow.”

“Eh?” said Lawlor, somewhat blankly.  “Well, we rode up on the blind side of the house—­from the north, see, got off, and sneaked around to the east end of the shack.  The windows was covered with cloths on the inside, which didn’t make me none too sure about Shaw havin’ no dealin’s with crooks.  It ain’t ordinary for a feller to be so savin’ on light.  Pretty soon we found a tear in one of the cloths, and lookin’ through that we seen old Piotto sittin’ beside Tom Shaw with his daughter on the other side.

“We went back to the north side of the house and figured out different ways of tacklin’ the job.  There was only the two of us, see, and the fellers inside that house was all cut out for man-killers.  How would you have gone after ’em, son?”