He stood chatting with another cattleman for a few moments, then drifted back to the rear of the hall again.  Underneath an elk’s head with magnificent antlers a party sat around a table playing draw poker with a skinned deck.  Two of them were wall-eyed strangers whom Dingwell guessed to be professional tinhorns.  Another ran a curio store in town.  The fourth was Dan Meldrum, one of the toughest crooks in the county.  Nineteen years ago Sheriff Beaudry had sent him to the penitentiary for rustling calves.  The fifth player sat next to the wall.  He was a large, broad-shouldered man close to fifty.  His face had the weather-beaten look of confidence that comes to an outdoor Westerner used to leading others.

While Dave was moving past this table, he noticed that Chet Fox was whispering in the ear of the man next the wall.  The poker-player nodded, and at the same moment his glance met that of Dingwell.  The gray eyes of the big fellow narrowed and grew chill.  Fox, starting to move away, recognized the cattleman from whom he had escaped half an hour before.  Taken by surprise, the little spy looked guilty as an urchin caught stealing apples.

It took no clairvoyant to divine what the subject of that whispered colloquy had been.  The cheerful grin of Dave included impartially Fox, Meldrum, and the player beneath the elk’s head.

The ex-convict spoke first.  “Come back to sit in our game, Dave?” he jeered.

Dingwell understood that this was a challenge.  It was impossible to look on the ugly, lupine face of the man, marked by the ravages of forty years of vice and unbridled passion, without knowing that he was ready for trouble now.  But Meldrum was a mere detail of a situation piquant enough even for so light-hearted a son of the Rockies as this cattleman.  Dave had already invited himself into a far bigger game of the Rutherford clan than this.  Moreover, just now he was so far ahead that he had cleared the table of all the stakes.  Meldrum knew this.  So did Hal Rutherford, the big man sitting next the wall.  What would be their next move?  Perhaps if he joined them he would find out.  This course held its dangers, but long experience had taught him that to walk through besetting perils was less risk than to run from them.

“If that’s an invitation, Dan, you’re on,” he answered gayly.  “Just a minute, and I’ll join you.  I want to send a message to Sweeney.”

Without even looking at Meldrum to see the effect of this, Dave beckoned a Mexican standing near.  “Tell the sheriff I want to see him here pronto.  You win a dollar if he is back within an hour.”

The Mexican disappeared.  Fox followed him.

The cattleman drew in his chair and was introduced to the two strangers.  The quick, searching look he gave each confirmed his first impression.  These men were professional gamblers.  It occurred to him that they had made a singularly poor choice of victims in Dan Meldrum and Hal Rutherford.  Either of them would reach for his gun at the first evidence of crooked play.