“There’s a job for you over at the Circle L—­if you want it.  I’ll throw things in your way; I’ll put you on your feet again—­give you stock and tools, and pretend I’ve sold them to you.  I’ll do anything to keep you square.  But if you tell Ruth, I’ll kill you as sure as my name is Lawler!”

“I’m agreein’,” said Hamlin, thickly.  “I ain’t wanted to do the things I’ve been doin’.  But things didn’t go right, an’ Singleton—­damn it, Lawler; I never liked the man, an’ I don’t know why I’ve been doin’ what I have been doin’.  But I’ve wanted to do somethin’ for Ruth—­so’s she could quit teachin’ an’ live like a lady.  I thought if I could get a bunch of coin together that mebbe she’d have——­”

“She’d see you dead before she’d touch it,” scoffed Lawler.

“Mebbe I’d be better off if I was dead,” said Hamlin, glumly.

“You’ll die, right enough, if you don’t keep your word to me,” grimly declared Lawler.

He strode to the door, leaped upon Red King and rode away.

Inside the cabin, Hamlin got to his feet and swayed toward the door, reaching it and looking out, to see Lawler riding rapidly toward Willets.

CHAPTER III

A WOMAN’S EYES

There had been a day when Willets was but a name, designating a water tank and a railroad siding where panting locomotives, hot and dry from a long run through an arid, sandy desert that stretched westward from the shores of civilization, rested, while begrimed, overalled men adjusted a metal spout which poured refreshing water into gaping reservoirs.

In that day Willets sat in the center of a dead, dry section, swathed in isolation so profound that passengers in the coaches turned to one another with awe in their voices and spoke of God and the insignificance of life.

But there was a small river near the water tank—­the headwaters of the Wolf—­or there had been no tank.  And a prophet of Business, noting certain natural advantages, had influenced the railroad company to build a corral and a station.

From that day Willets became assured of a future.  Cattlemen in the Wolf River section began to ship stock from the new station, rather than drive to Red Rock—­another shipping point five hundred miles east.

From the first it became evident that Willets would not be a boom town.  It grew slowly and steadily until its fame began to trickle through to the outside world—­though it was a cattle town in the beginning, and a cattle town it would remain all its days.

Therefore, because of its slow growth, there were old buildings in Willets.  The frame station had an ancient appearance.  Its roof sagged in the center, its walls were bulging with weakness.  But it stood defiantly flaunting its crimson paint above the wooden platform, a hardy pioneer among the moderns.

Business had strayed from the railroad track; it had left the station, the freighthouse, the company corral, and some open sheds, to establish its enterprises one block southward.  There, fringing a wide, unpaved street that ran east and west, parallel with the gleaming steel rails, Business reared its citadels.