He halted.  She had sunk into a chair—­collapsed into it, rather, and lay there half fainting with one arm thrown across her face.  Hervey glowered down on her a moment and then turned on his heel and left the house.

He went straight to the bunkhouse, gathered the men about him, and told them the news.

“Boys,” he said, “the cat’s out of the bag.  I’ve found out everything, and it’s what I been fearing.  She started begging me to keep off Red Jim’s trail.  Wouldn’t hear no reason.  I told her there wasn’t nothing for me to gain by throwing him off the ranch.  Except that he’d been ordered off and he had to go.  It’d make a joke of me and all of you boys if the word got around that one gent had laughed at us and stayed right in the Valley when we told him to get out.”

A fierce volley of curses bore him out.

“Well,” said Hervey, “then she come right out and told me the truth:  she’s in love with Perris.  She told me so herself!”

They gaped at him.  They were young enough, most of them, and lonely and romantic enough, to have looked on Marianne with a sort of sad longing which their sense of humor kept from being anything more aspiring.  But to think that she had given her heart so suddenly and so freely to this stranger was a shock.  Hervey reaped the harvest of their alarmed glances with a vast inward content.  Every look he met was an incipient gun levelled at the head of Red Jim.

“Didn’t make no bones about it,” he said, “she plumb begged for him.  Well, boys, she ain’t going to get him.  I think too much of old man Jordan to let his girl run off with a man-killing vagabond like this Perris.  He’s good looking and he talks dead easy.  That’s what’s turned the trick.  I guess the rest of you would back me up?”

The answer was a growl.

“I’ll go bust his neck,” said Little Joe furiously.  “One of them heart-breakers, I figure.”

“First thing,” said the foreman, “is to see that she don’t get to him.  If she does, she’ll sure run off with him.  But she’s easy kept from that.  Joe, you and Shorty watch the hoss corrals to-night, will you?  And don’t let her get through to a hoss by talking soft to you.”

They vowed that they would be adamant.  They vowed it with many oaths.  In fact, the rage of the cowpunchers was steadily growing.  Red Perris was more than a mere insolent interloper who had dared to scoff at the banded powers of the Valley of the Eagles.  He was far worse.  He was the most despicable sort of sneak and thief for he was trying to steal the heart and ruin the life of a girl.  They had looked upon the approaching conflict with Perris as a bitter pill that must be swallowed for the sake of the Valley of the Eagles outfit.  They looked upon it, from this moment, as a religious duty from which no one with the name of a man dared to shrink.  Little Joe and Shorty at once started for the corral.  The others gathered around the foreman for further details, but he waved them away and retired to his own bunk.  For he never used the little room at the end of the building which was set aside for the foreman.  He lived and slept and ate among his cowpunchers and that was one reason for his hold over them.