LITMIR.BIZ

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thrown back, exposing the decoration.

      "Oh! ho! Look at the tenderfoot's medal," chuckled one of the young cattlemen; "wonder what it's for?"

      "The championship of the bread and milk eaters of New York State, I reckon," grinned the other, and another shout of laughter bore witness to the table's approval of this primitive humor.

      Rob flushed angrily, but said nothing. He did not wish to stir up trouble with two such ill-mannered young boors as the cattle-punchers were showing themselves to be. Encouraged by his silence, the badgering went on. One by one the other guests had been served by the Chinese attendant, with raisin pie and half-melted cheese, and had arisen and left the room. The two young cow-punchers and the Boy Scouts were shortly left alone in the fly-infested apartment. Rob and Merritt, who found the surroundings little to their liking, hurried through their meal, but Tubby ate conscientiously through everything that was brought him.

      It now grew plain, even if it had not been so before, that the two sun-burned young plainsmen sitting opposite the boys were deliberately trying to aggravate them.

      Interpreting the boys' silence as fear, they grew bolder and bolder in their remarks.

      "Have to catch up a real cow, I reckon," dreamily went on one of the boys' tormentors, gazing at the ceiling abstractedly, but fingering the condensed milk can.

      "What for?" inquired the other, playing into his hand.

      "Why, the tin cow might disagree with mama's boys."

      "Ho-ho-ho! Say, Clark."

      "What, Jess?"

      "Reckon they must be overstocked with yearlings East."

      "Looks that way. Do you suppose Easterners are born or jest grow?"

      The youth addressed by his companion as Jess looked straight at Rob as he spoke, and the insult was unmistakable. Rob's self-control suddenly deserted him with a rush.

      "I'll answer for your friend," he snapped out. "They grow-and-they-grow-right."

      Tubby looked up in surprise from his raisin pie, and Merritt's eyes opened wide at Rob's tone. It foreboded trouble as sure as a hurricane signal foretells a storm.

      "My! my!" grinned Jess, but it was an uncomfortable sort of a grin, "hear the little boy with the medal talk. Come on, Clark, let's go see to the ponies while the tenderfeet wait for their nurse to come and take their bibs off."

      They rose from the table, but Rob, still inwardly raging but outwardly cool as ice, stopped them.

      "Say," he said, "are you fellows cattlemen?"

      "You bet, stranger, from the ground up," rejoined Clark, with a vast air of self-importance.

      "Well, then we've been misinformed in the East," said Rob, coolly brushing a few stray crumbs from his knees.

      "How's that?"

      "Why, we'd been told that cattlemen were natural gentlemen; but whoever told us that was dead wrong. Judging by you fellows, they're not natural, and certainly not the other thing."

      Clark's face grew crimson and he muttered something about "fixing the fresh kid," but his companion drew him away.

      "We'll have plenty of time to rope and brand these young mavericks," he said, as they left the room.

      As they vanished Rob burst into a shout of laughter.

      "Score one for the Boy Scouts," he said. "If ever there were two discomfited cow-punchers, those fellows are it."

      The landlord, who had entered the room a few moments before, came forward as the boys arose from the table. He was a tall, lanky man, with a look of perpetual gloom on his face. A drooping, straw-colored mustache did not help to enliven his funereal features.

      "Say, strangers," he said, in a dismal voice, "you've started in bad."

      "How's that?" inquired Rob, in a somewhat peppery tone.

      "Why, riling up Clark Jennings and Jess Randell; they's two of the toughest boys in the country."

      "Think so, I guess," snorted Tubby.

      "Well, wait and see," said the landlord, with a melancholy shrug of his sloping shoulders. "Three dinners, please."

      He extended a yellow palm.

      "How much?" asked Rob, putting his hand in his pocket.

      "Three dollars and six bits."

      "What! three dollars and seventy-five cents for that fly-ridden stuff?"

      "That's the charge, stranger."

      Rob, seeing there was no use arguing, paid over the money, in exchange for which they had received three greasy plates of soup, three portions of ragged, overdone bull beef, and three slabs of raisin pie, together with three cups of muddy, inky coffee. But a sudden impulse of curiosity gripped him.

      "Say, what's the twenty-five cents extra all round for?" he asked.

      "Fer your ponies," rejoined the landlord, more miserably than ever. He seemed to be on the point of bursting into tears.

      "Ponies!" gasped Rob. "We haven't got any."

      "Never mind, it's a rule of the house," said the landlord, as if that settled the matter; "and if you ain't got any ponies it ain't my fault, is it?"

      There was no answering this sort of logic, and the boys strolled out to the porch to see if they could sight any trace of Harry Harkness. There was no sign of him, however, and after a prolonged period of gazing across the blazing desert, the boys sank back in three of the big rockers that stood in a row on the porch. It was dull, sitting there in the intense heat and drowsy silence, broken only at long intervals by the clatter of a pony's hoofs as some cow-puncher ambled by at an easy lope. A loud snore from Tubby soon proclaimed that he was off, and Merritt and Rob were about to follow him into the land of dreams, when there came a sudden interruption.

      Rob felt his shoulder roughly seized from behind, and a harsh, mandatory voice addressed him:

      "Say, that's my chair you're sitting in. You'll have to get out."

      The boy turned and saw Clark Jennings glaring at him. Close beside him, with a grin on his face, was Jess Randell.

      "Even supposing it is your chair," said Rob, "you can ask me for it like a gentleman, – then," he added to himself, "I'll think over giving it to you."

      "Oh, I guess you think you're a mighty fine gentleman?"

      "I hope I am one, yes."

      "Well, out here gentlemen have to fight for their title. Are you going to give me that chair?"

      "As you are no more a guest of this hotel than I am, I shall sit here till I get ready to get up."

      "Then I'll have to help you out – Ouch!"

      The remark and the exclamation came close together. Clark Jennings had bent forward as he spoke, and roughly laid hold of Rob to pull him from the chair by main force. As he did so, however, Rob had suddenly changed from a passive, rather sleepy boy, to a bundle of steel springs full of fight. Clark Jennings, as he laid hold of Rob, had felt himself hurled backward. Unable to check his impetus, he had landed against the wall of the hotel with a force which caused him to give vent to the exclamation recorded.

      "Look out, tenderfoot, he'll kill yer," warned the melancholy landlord from the window of the office, where he had been entering in a greasy book the extortion practiced on the boys.

      Several cow-punchers awoke to interest at the same time as Tubby and Merritt began to realize what was happening.

      His eyes blazing with fury, Clark Jennings crouched low, and then reaching back drew a revolver from his hip. He aimed it full at Rob, but simultaneously a strange thing happened. Rob was seen to dart forward, diving right under the leveled pistol. The next instant the weapon was spinning through the air. It landed with a thump in the middle of the dusty road. But Clark Jennings didn't see it, for the excellent reason that at that precise moment he was lying flat on his back on the hotel veranda. Before his eyes swam a whole galaxy of constellations. Over him stood Rob, with flushed face and clinched fists.

      CHAPTER

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