It was the first time they had ever laid hands on the Marquis during their somewhat rude sports.

“What are you up to?” he asked, indignantly, with flashing eyes.

“Go easy, Marquis,” whispered Rube Fellows, one of the boys that held him.  “It’s all in fun.  Take it good-natured and they’ll let you off light.  They’re only goin’ to stretch you over the log and tan you eight or ten times with the leggin’s.  ’Twon’t hurt much.”

The Marquis, with an exclamation of anger, his white teeth gleaming, suddenly exhibited a surprising strength.  He wrenched with his arms so violently that the four men were swayed and dragged many yards from the log.  A cry of anger escaped him, and then Miss Sally, his eyes cleared of the tobacco, saw, and he immediately mixed with the struggling group.

But at that moment a loud “Hallo!” rang in their ears, and a buckboard drawn by a team of galloping mustangs spun into the campfire’s circle of light.  Every man turned to look, and what they saw drove from their minds all thoughts of carrying out Phonograph Davis’s rather time-worn contribution to the evening’s amusement.  Bigger game than the Marquis was at hand, and his captors released him and stood staring at the approaching victim.

The buckboard and team belonged to Sam Holly, a cattleman from the Big Muddy.  Sam was driving, and with him was a stout, smooth-faced man, wearing a frock coat and a high silk hat.  That was the county judge, Mr. Dave Hackett, candidate for reelection.  Sam was escorting him about the county, among the camps, to shake up the sovereign voters.

The men got out, hitched the team to a mesquite, and walked toward the fire.

Instantly every man in camp, except the Marquis, Miss Sally, and Pink Saunders, who had to play host, uttered a frightful yell of assumed terror and fled on all sides into the darkness.

“Heavens alive!” exclaimed Hackett, “are we as ugly as that?  How do you do, Mr. Saunders?  Glad to see you again.  What are you doing to my hat, Holly?”

“I was afraid of this hat,” said Sam Holly, meditatively.  He had taken the hat from Hackett’s head and was holding it in his hand, looking dubiously around at the shadows beyond the firelight where now absolute stillness reigned.  “What do you think, Saunders?”

Pink grinned.

“Better elevate it some,” he said, in the tone of one giving disinterested advice.  “The light ain’t none too good.  I wouldn’t want it on my head.”

Holly stepped upon the hub of a hind wheel of the grub wagon and hung the hat upon a limb of a live-oak.  Scarcely had his foot touched the ground when the crash of a dozen six-shooters split the air, and the hat fell to the ground riddled with bullets.

A hissing noise was heard as if from a score of rattlesnakes, and now the cow-punchers emerged on all sides from the darkness, stepping high, with ludicrously exaggerated caution, and “hist"-ing to one another to observe the utmost prudence in approaching.  They formed a solemn, wide circle about the hat, gazing at it in manifest alarm, and seized every few moments by little stampedes of panicky flight.