“To hell with your papers.  I’m here and I’m goin’ to stay.”

“Well, we’ll visit you regular,” shouted a puncher.

“Better come over to the house and talk things over,” said Corliss.  “I don’t want trouble with you—­but my boys do.”

Loring hesitated.  One of his men, spurring up, whispered to him.

Wingle, keenly alert, restrained a cowboy who was edging forward.  “Don’t start nothin’,” he said.  “If she’s goin’ to start, she’ll start herself.”

Loring turned to Corliss.  “I’d like to look at them papers,” he said slowly.

“All right.  We’ll ride over to the house.”

The two bands of riders swung toward the north, passed the tank, and trotted up to the ranch-gate.  They dismounted and were met by Shoop and his companions.  Loring blinked and muttered.  He had been outgeneraled.  One of the Concho riders laughed.  Loring’s hand slipped to his belt.  “Don’t,” said Corliss easily.  The tension relaxed, and the men began joking and laughing.

“Where’s Sundown?” queried Corliss.

Loring gestured toward the house.

“I’ll go,” said Wingle.  And he shouldered through the group of scowling herders and entered the house.

Sundown, with hands tied, was sitting on the edge of his bed.  “They roped me,” he said lugubriously, “in me own house.  Bud he was goin’ to untie me, but I says for the love of Mike leave me tied or I’ll take a chair and brain that Chola what kicked Gentle Annie in the stummick this mornin’.  He was goin’ to milk her and I reckon she didn’t like his looks.  Anyhow, she laid him out with a kind of hind-leg upper-cut.  When he come to, he set in to kickin’ her.  I got his picture and if I get me hands on him . . .”

Wingle cut the rope and Sundown stood up.  “They swiped me gun,” he asserted.

“Here’s one I took off a herder,” said Wingle. “if things get to boilin’ over—­why, jest nacherally wilt the legs from under anything that looks like a Chola.  Jack’s got the cards, all right—­but I don’t jest like the look of things.  Loring’s in the corner and he’s got his back up.”

As they came from the house, Loring was reading the papers that Corliss had handed to him.  The old sheep-man glanced at the signatures on the documents and then slowly folded them, hesitated, and with a quick turn of his wrist tore them and flung the pieces in Corliss’s face.  “That for your law!  We stay!”

Corliss bit his lip, and the dull red of restrained anger burned in his face.  He had gone too far to retreat or retract.  He knew that his men would lose all respect for him if he backed down now.  Yet he was unable to frame a plan whereby he might avoid the arbitration of the six-gun.  His men eyed him curiously.  Was Jack going to show a yellow streak?  They thought that he would not—­and yet . . .

Sundown raised his long arm and pointed.  “There’s the gent what kicked me cow,” he said, his face white and his eyes burning.