“Didn’t hear his name.  Had no talk with him.  Hear he is called Keller,” he said.

“What’s he look like?”

“You-all can see for yourself.  This here’s the gent rolling a tail this way.”

The little cloud of dust had come nearer and disclosed as its source a rider on a rangy roan with four white-stockinged feet.  Drawing up in front of the porch, the man swung himself easily from the saddle and glanced around.

“Evening, gentlemen,” he said pleasantly.

Some nodded grimly, some growled an acknowledgment of his greeting.  But the lack of cordiality, the presence of hostility, could not be doubted.  The young man stood at supple ease before them, one hand resting on his hip and the other on the saddle.  He let his unabashed gaze travel from one to another, understood perfectly what those expressionless eyes of stone were telling him, and, with a little laugh of light derision, trailed debonairly into the store.

“Any mail for Larrabie Keller?” he inquired of the postmistress.

The girl at the window glanced incuriously at him and turned to look.  When she pushed his letter through the grating he met for an instant a flash of dark eyes from a mobile face which the sun and superb health had painted to a harmony of gold and russet, with the soft glow of pink pushing through the tan.  The unexpectedness of the picture magnetized his gaze.  Admiration, frank and human, shone from the steel-gray eyes that had till now been only a mask.  Beneath his steady look she flushed indignantly and withdrew from the window.

Convicted of rudeness, the last thing he had meant, Keller returned to the porch and leaned against the door jamb while he opened his letter.  His appearance immediately sandbagged conversation.  Stony eyes were focused upon him incuriously, with expressionless hostility.

He noted, however, an exception.  Another had been added to the group, a lad of about eighteen, slim and swarthy, with the same dark look of pride he had seen on the face at the stamp window.  It was easy to guess that they were brother and sister, very likely twins, though he found in the boy’s expression a sulky impatience lacking in hers.  Perhaps the lad needed the discipline that life hammers into those who want to be a law unto themselves.

With an insolence extremely boyish, the lad turned to Healy.  “I’m for running out a few of these nesters.  We’ve got more than we can use, I reckon.  The range is overstocked now—­both with them and cows.  Come a bad year and half of our cattle will starve.”

There was a moment of surcharged silence.  Phil Sanderson had voiced the growing feeling of them all, but he had flung it out as a stark challenge before the time was ripe.  It was one thing to resent the coming of settlers; it was quite another to set themselves openly against the law that allowed these men to homestead the natural parks in the hills.