His partner understood what that last veiled allusion meant.  The weeks had slipped away since the fracas in front of the Silver Dollar.  The enemy had made no move.  But cowpunchers returning to the ranch from town reported that both Meldrum and Charlton had sworn revenge.  It was an even bet that either one of them would shoot on sight.

Beaudry took Dave’s advice.  Every day he rode out to a wash and carried with him a rifle and a revolver.  He practiced for rapidity as well as accuracy.  He learned how to fire from the hip, how to empty a revolver in less than two seconds, how to shoot lying down, and how to hit a mark either from above or below.

The young man never went to town alone.  He stuck close to the ranch.  The first weeks had been full of stark terror lest he might find one of his enemies waiting for him behind a clump of prickly pear or hidden in the mesquite of some lonely wash.  He was past that stage, but his nerves were still jumpy.  It was impossible for him to forget that at least three men were deadly enemies of his and would stamp out his life as they would that of a wolf.  Each morning he wakened with a little shock of dread.  At night he breathed relief for a few hours of safety.

Meanwhile Dave watched him with an indolent carelessness of manner that masked his sympathy.  If it had been possible, he would have taken the burden on his own broad, competent shoulders.  But this was not in Dingwell’s code.  He had been brought up in that outdoor school of the West where a man has to game out his own feuds.  As the cattleman saw it, Roy had to go through now just as his father had done seventeen years before.

In town one day Dave met Pat Ryan and had a talk with him over dinner.  A remark made by the little cowpuncher surprised his friend.  Dingwell looked at him with narrowed, inquiring eyes.

The Irishman nodded.  “Ye thought you were the only one that knew it?  Well, I’m on, too, Dave.”

“That’s not what I hear everywhere else, Pat,” answered the cattleman, still studying the other.  “Go down the street and mention the same of Royal Beaudry—­ask any one if he is game.  What will you get for a reply?”

Without the least hesitation Ryan spoke out.  “You’ll hear that he’s got more guts than any man in Washington County—­that he doesn’t know what fear is.  Then likely you’ll be told it’s natural enough, since he’s the son of Jack Beaudry, the fighting sheriff.  Ever-rybody believes that excipt you and me, Dave.  We know better.”

“What do we know, Pat?”

“We know that the bye is up against a man-size job and is scared stiff.”

“Hmp!  Was he scared when he licked a dozen men at the Silver Dollar and laid out for repairs three of the best fighters in New Mexico?”

“You’re shouting right he was, Dave.  No man alive could ‘a’ done it if he hadn’t been crazy with fright.”

Dingwell laughed.  “Hope I’m that way, then, when I get into my next tight place.”  He added after a moment:  “The trouble with the boy is that he has too much imagination.  He makes his own private little hell beforehand.”