“All right,” sneered the foreman.  “Run with yore tale of grief to Crawford.  Tell him I been pickin’ on you.  I hear you’ve got to be quite a pet of his.”

This brought Dave up with a short turn.  He could not take advantage of the service he had done the owner of the D Bar Lazy R to ask him to interfere in his behalf with the foreman.  Doble might be cynically defrauding him of part of what was due him in wages.  Dave would have to fight that out with him for himself.  The worst of it was that he had no redress.  Unless he appealed to the cattleman he would have to accept what the foreman offered.

Moreover, his pride was touched.  He was young enough to be sensitive on the subject of his ability to look out for himself.

“I’m no pet of anybody,” he flung out.  “Gimme that money.  It ain’t a square deal, but I reckon I can stand it.”

“I reckon you’ll have to.  It’s neck meat or nothin’,” grunted the foreman.

Doble counted him out eighty dollars in cattlemen’s checks and paid him two-fifty in cash.  While Dave signed a receipt the hook-nosed foreman, broad shoulders thrown back and thumbs hitched in the arm-holes of his vest, sat at ease in a tilted chair and grinned maliciously at his victim.  He was “puttin’ somethin’ over on him,” and he wanted Dave to know it.  Dug had no affection for his half-brother, but he resented the fact that Sanders publicly and openly despised him as a crook.  He took it as a personal reflection on himself.

Still smouldering with anger at this high-handed proceeding, Dave went down to the Longhorn Corral and saddled his horse.  He had promised Byington to help water the herd.

This done, he rode back to town, hitched the horse back of a barber shop, and went in for a shave.  Presently he was stretched in a chair, his boots thrown across the foot rest in front of him.

The barber lathered his face and murmured gossip in his ear.  “George Doble and Miller claim they’re goin’ to Denver to run some skin game at a street fair.  They’re sure slick guys.”

Dave offered no comment.

“You notice they didn’t steal any of Em Crawford’s stock.  No, sirree!  They knew better.  Hopped away with broncs belongin’ to you boys because they knew it’d be safe.”

“Picked easy marks, did they?” asked the puncher sardonically.

The man with the razor tilted the chin of his customer and began to scrape.  “Well, o’course you’re only boys.  They took advantage of that and done you a meanness.”

Dug Doble came into the shop, very grim about the mouth.  He stopped to look down sarcastically at the new boots Sanders was wearing.

“I see you’ve bought you a new pair of boots,” he said in a heavy, domineering voice.

Dave waited without answering, his eyes meeting steadily those of the foreman.

The big fellow laid a paper on the breast of the cowpuncher.  “Here’s a bill for a pair of boots you charged to the old man’s account—­eighteen dollars.  I got it just now at the store.  You’ll dig up.”