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fast, are they?"

      "You're damn whistlin'. They're hivin' off for parts unknown. Malapi first off, looks like. They got friends there."

      "Steelman and his outfit will protect them while they hunt cover and make a getaway. Miller mentioned Denver before the race—said he was figurin' on goin' there. Maybe—"

      "He was probably lyin'. You can't tell. Point is, we've got to get busy. My notion is we'd better make a bee-line for Malapi right away," proposed Bob.

      "We'll travel all night. No use wastin' any more time."

      Dug Doble received their decision sourly. "It don't tickle me a heap to be left short-handed because you two boys have got an excuse to get to town quicker."

      Hart looked him straight in the eye. "Call it an excuse if you want to. We're after a pair of shorthorn crooks that stole our horses."

      The foreman flushed angrily. "Don't come bellyachin' to me about yore broomtails. I ain't got 'em."

      "We know who's got 'em," said Dave evenly. "What we want is a wage check so as we can cash it at Malapi."

      "You don't get it," returned the big foreman bluntly. "We pay off when we reach the end of the drive."

      "I notice you paid yore brother and Miller when we gave an order for it," Hart retorted with heat.

      "A different proposition. They hadn't signed up for this drive like you boys did. You'll get what's comin' to you when I pay off the others. You'll not get it before."

      The two riders retired sulkily. They felt it was not fair, but on the trail the foreman is an autocrat. From the other riders they borrowed a few dollars and gave in exchange orders on their pay checks.

      Within an hour they were on the road. Fresh horses had been roped from the remuda and were carrying them at an even Spanish jog-trot through the night. The stars came out, clear and steady above a ghostly world at sleep. The desert was a place of mystery, of vast space peopled by strange and misty shapes.

      The plain stretched vaguely before them. Far away was the thin outline of the range which enclosed the valley. The riders held their course by means of that trained sixth sense of direction their occupation had developed.

      They spoke little. Once a coyote howled dismally from the edge of the mesa. For the most part there was no sound except the chuffing of the horses' movements and the occasional ring of a hoof on the baked ground.

      The gray dawn, sifting into the sky, found them still traveling. The mountains came closer, grew more definite. The desert flamed again, dry, lifeless, torrid beneath a sky of turquoise. Dust eddies whirled in inverted cones, wind devils playing in spirals across the sand. Tablelands, mesas, wide plains, desolate lava stretches. Each in turn was traversed by these lean, grim, bronzed riders.

      They reached the foothills and left behind the desert shimmering in the dancing heat. In a deep gorge, where the hill creases gave them shade, the punchers threw off the trail, unsaddled, hobbled their horses, and stole a few hours' sleep.

      In the late afternoon they rode back to the trail through a draw, the ponies wading fetlock deep in yellow, red, blue, and purple flowers. The mountains across the valley looked in the dry heat as though made of papier-mâché. Closer at hand the undulations of sand hills stretched toward the pass for which they were making.

      A mule deer started out of a dry wash and fled into the sunset light. The long, stratified faces of rock escarpments caught the glow of the sliding sun and became battlemented towers of ancient story.

      The riders climbed steadily now, no longer engulfed in the ground swell of land waves. They breathed an air like wine, strong, pure, bracing. Presently their way led them into a hill pocket, which ran into a gorge of piñons stretching toward Gunsight Pass.

      The stars were out again when they looked down from the other side of the pass upon the lights of Malapi.

      Chapter V

       Supper at Delmonico's Interrupted

       Table of Contents

      The two D Bar Lazy R punchers ate supper at Delmonico's. The restaurant was owned by Wong Chung. A Cantonese celestial did the cooking and another waited on table. The price of a meal was twenty-five cents, regardless of what one ordered.

      Hop Lee, the waiter, grinned at the frolicsome youths with the serenity of a world-old wisdom.

      "Bleef steak, plork chop, lamb chop, hlam'neggs, clorn bleef hash, Splanish stew," he chanted, reciting the bill of fare.

      "Yes," murmured Bob.

      The waiter said his piece again.

      "Listens good to me," agreed Dave. "Lead it to us."

      "You takee two—bleef steak and hlam'neggs, mebbe," suggested Hop helpfully.

      "Tha's right. Two orders of everything on the me-an-you, Charlie."

      Hop did not argue with them. He never argued with a customer. If they stormed at him he took refuge in a suddenly acquired lack of understanding of English. If they called him Charlie or John or One Lung, he accepted the name cheerfully and laid it to a racial mental deficiency of the 'melicans. Now he decided to make a selection himself.

      "Vely well. Bleef steak and hlam'neggs."

      "Fried potatoes done brown, John."

      "Flied plotatoes. Tea or cloffee?"

      "Coffee," decided Dave for both of them. "Warm mine."

      "And custard pie," added Bob. "Made from this year's crop."

      "Aigs sunny side up," directed his friend.

      "Fry mine one on one side and one on the other," Hart continued facetiously.

      "Vely well." Hop Lee's impassive face betrayed no perplexity as he departed. In the course of a season he waited on hundreds of wild men from the hills, drunk and sober.

      Dave helped himself to bread from a plate stacked high with thick slices. He buttered it and began to eat. Hart did the same. At Delmonico's nobody ever waited till the meal was served. Just about to attack a second slice, Dave stopped to stare at his companion. Hart was looking past his shoulder with alert intentness. Dave turned his head. Two men, leaving the restaurant, were paying the cashier.

      "They just stepped outa that booth to the right," whispered Bob.

      The men were George Doble and a cowpuncher known as Shorty, a broad, heavy-set little man who worked for Bradley Steelman, owner of the Rocking Horse Ranch, what time he was not engaged on nefarious business of his own. He was wearing a Chihuahua hat and leather chaps with silver conchas.

      At this moment Hop Lee arrived with dinner.

      Dave sighed as he grinned at his friend. "I need that supper in my system. I sure do, but I reckon I don't get it."

      "You do not, old lizard," agreed Hart. "I'll say Doble's the most inconsiderate guy I ever did trail. Why couldn't he 'a' showed up a half-hour later, dad gum his ornery hide?"

      They paid their bill and passed into the street. Immediately the sound of a clear, high voice arrested their attention. It vibrated indignation and dread.

      "What have you done with my father?" came sharply to them on the wings of the soft night wind.

      A young woman was speaking. She was in a buggy and was talking to two men on the sidewalk—the two men who had preceded the range-riders out of the restaurant.

      "Why, Miss, we ain't done a thing to him—nothin' a-tall." The man Shorty was speaking, and in a tone of honeyed conciliation. It was quite plain he did not want a scene on the street.

      "That's a lie." The voice of the girl broke for an instant to a sob. "Do you think I don't know you're Brad Steelman's handy man, that you do his meanness

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