From the gulf a challenging voice rose.  “Hello, up there!”

“It’s me—­Joe,” answered the rider.

“Time you were gettin’ here,” growled the other, as yet only a voice in the darkness.

Slowly the horse slid forward to a ribbon of trail that led less precipitously to the camp.

“‘Lo, Joe.  Fall off an’ rest,” a one-armed man invited.  By the light of the camp-fire he was a hard-faced, wall-eyed citizen with a jaw like a steel trap.

Yankie dismounted and straddled to the fire.  “How-how; I’m heap hungry, boys.  Haven’t et since mornin’.”

“We’re ‘most out of grub.  Got nothin’ but jerked beef an’ hard-tack.  How are things a-stackin’, Joe?” asked a heavy-set, bow-legged man with a cold, fishy eye.

“Looks good, Dave.  I’ll lead the cattle to you.  It’ll be up to you an’ Albeen an’ Dumont to make a get-away with ’em.”

“Don’t you worry none about that.  Once I get these beeves on the trail there can’t no shorthorn cattleman take ’em away from me.”

“Oh, you’re doin’ this thing, are you?” drawled Albeen offensively.  “There’s been a heap of big I talk around here lately.  First off, I want to tell you that when you call Homer Webb a shorthorn cattleman you’ve got another guess comin’.  He’s a sure enough old-timer.  Webb knocked the bark off’n this country when it was green, an’ you got to rise up early an’ travel fast if you want to slip over anything on him,”

“That’s whatever,” agreed Yankie.  “I don’t love the old man a whole lot.  I’ve stood about all from him I’m intendin’ to.  One of these days it’s goin’ to be him or me.  But the old man’s there every jump of the road.  He knew New Mexico when Los Portales was a whistlin’ post in the desert.  He’s fought through this war an’ come through richer than when he started.  If I was lookin’ for an easy mark I’d sure pass up Webb.”

“He’s got you lads buffaloed,” jeered Roush.  “Webb looks like anybody else to me.  I don’t care if he’s worth a million.  If he fools with me he’ll find I fog him quick.”

“I’ve known fellows before that got all filled up with talk an’ had to steam off about every so often,” commented Albeen to the world at large.

“Meanin’ me?”

Albeen carefully raked a live coal from the fire and pressed it down into the bowl of his pipe.  The eyes in his leathery, brown face had grown hard as jade.  For some time he and Dave Roush had been ready for an explosion.  It could not come any too soon to suit the one-armed man.

“Meanin’ you if you want to take it that way.”  Albeen looked straight at him with an unwinking gaze.  “You’re not the only man on the reservation that wears his gun low, Roush.  Maybe you’re a wolf for fair.  I’ve sure heard you claim it right often.  You’re a two-gun man.  I pack only one, seem’ as I’m shy a wing.  But don’t git the notion you can ride me.  I won’t stand for it a minute.”

“Sho!  Dave didn’t mean anything like that.  Did you, Dave?” interposed Dumont hastily.  “You was just kind o’ jokin’, wasn’t you?”