“I don’t ask you to come in.  I’ll fix his clock all right.”

“Nothing doing.  I won’t have it.”  Rutherford, by a stroke of strategy, carried the war into the country of the other.  “I gave way to you about Dingwell, though I hated to try that Indian stuff on him.  He’s a white man.  I’ve always liked him.  It’s a rotten business.”

“What else can you do?  We daren’t turn him loose.  You don’t want to gun him.  There is nothing left but to tighten the thumbscrews.”

“It won’t do any good,” protested the big man with a frown.  “He’s game.  He’ll go through. . . .  And if it comes to a showdown, I won’t have him starved to death.”

Tighe looked at him through half-hooded, cruel eyes.  “He’ll weaken.  Another day or two will do it.  Don’t worry about Dingwell.”

“There’s not a yellow streak in him.  You haven’t a chance to make him quit.”  Rutherford took another turn up and down the room diagonally.  “I don’t like this way of fighting.  It’s—­damnable, man!  I won’t have any harm come to Dave or to the kid either.  I stand pat on that, Jess.”

The man with the crutches swallowed hard.  His Adam’s apple moved up and down like an agitated thermometer.  When he spoke it was in a smooth, oily voice of submission, but Rutherford noticed that the rapacious eyes were hooded.

“What you say goes, Hal.  You’re boss of this round-up.  I was jest telling you how it looked to me.”

“Sure.  That’s all right, Jess.  But you want to remember that public sentiment is against us.  We’ve pretty near gone our limit up here.  If there was no other reason but that, it would be enough to make us let this young fellow alone.  We can’t afford a killing in the park now.”

Tighe assented, almost with servility.  But the cattleman carried away with him a conviction that the man had yielded too easily, that his restless brain would go on planning destruction for young Beaudry just the same.

He was on his way up Chicito Canon and he stopped at Rothgerber’s ranch to see Beaudry.  The young man was not at home.

“He start early this morning to canfass for his vindmill,” the old German explained.

After a moment’s thought Rutherford left a message.  “Tell him it isn’t safe for him to stay in the park; that certain parties know who ‘R.B.’ is and will sure act on that information.  Say I said for him to come and see me as soon as he gets back.  Understand?  Right away when he reaches here.”

The owner of the horse ranch left his mount in the Rothgerber corral and passed through the pasture on foot to Chicito.  Half an hour later he dropped into the jacal of Meldrum.

He found the indomitable Dingwell again quizzing Meldrum about his residence at Santa Fe during the days he wore a striped uniform.  The former convict was grinding his teeth with fury.

“I reckon you won’t meet many old friends when you go back this time, Dan.  Maybe there will be one or two old-timers that will know you, but it won’t be long before you make acquaintances,” Dave consoled him.