“Shore never had. But I can lick you, Missouri,” she replied, her high gay laugh pealing out.

  Jim realised that she would make good her word unless he carried the battle to close range. Wherefore he rushed her, getting a snowball square on the nose for his pains. She dodged.

  “Aw, Jim — stand up — an’ fight square,” she squealed.

  But he caught her, tumbled her into the snow, rolled her over and over, and finally swept a great armful upon her. Then he ran for dear life, tinglingly aware the snowy cyclone at his heels.

  Later Jim emerged from concealment and walked down to the bunk-house. He had not seen the boys for several days. He stamped on the porch.

  “Hey; don’t pack no snow in hyar,” yelled a voice. “I gotta do the sweepin’ fer this outfit.”

  Jim opened the door and went in. The big room was cheerful with its crackling fire, and amazingly clean, considering it harboured the hardest cowboy outfit in Arizona.

  “Howdy, boys!” he sang out.

  “You needn’t come an’ crow over us,” answered Bud. “Sleigh-ridin’ with Molly Dunn!”

  Jackson Way looked askance at Jim’s snowy boots, his lean young face puckered and resentful. “Boss, I reckon you had this snow come on purpose.”

  Hump Stevens spoke from his bunk, where he lay propped up, cheerful and smiling.

  “How are you, Hump?”

  “Rarin’ to go, Boss. I been walkin’ around this mornin’. An’ I won all the money the boys had.”

  “Good work,” said Jim, and turning to Uphill Frost, who sat before the fire in a rocking-chair, with a crutch significantly at hand. “And you, Up?”

  “Boss, I ain’t so damn good, far as disposition goes. But I could fork a horse if I had to.”

  “Great! Where’s Cherry and Lonestar?” went on Jim.

  “They hoofed it in town to see Slinger,” replied Frost.

  “I haven’t been to the hospital for three days,” said Jim. “How’s Slinger coming around?”

  “He was up, walkin’ around, cussin’ Doc fer not lettin’ him smoke all he wants. Reckon time hangs heavy on Slinger. He can’t read much, an’ he says he wants to get back in the woods. Asked why you didn’t come to see him. Didn’t he, Bud?”

  “Sure. Slinger complained like hell of your neglect, Boss. I seen him yestiddy. An’ I told him thet no one never seen you no more. Then he cussed Molly fer not fetchin’ you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll see him tomorrow,” replied Jim, contritely.

  Curly Prentiss, the handsome blond young giant of the Diamond outfit, sat at a table, writing with absorbed violence. He alone had not appeared to note Jim’s entrance.

  “Curly, I’ve news for you.”

  But Curly gave no sign that he heard, whereupon Jim addressed Bud. “What ails Curly?”

  “Same old sickness, Boss. I’ve seen Curly doubled up with that fer five years, about every few months. Mebbe it’s a little wuss than usual, fer his girl chucked him an’ married Wess Stebbins.”

  “No!”

  “Sure’s a fack. They run off to Winslow. You see, Curly come the high an’ mighty once too often. Caroline bucked. An’ they had it hot an’ heavy. Curly told her to go where it was hot — so she says — an’ he marched off with his haid up...Wal, Carrie took him at his word. Thet is — he’d unhooked her bridle. Wess always was loony over her, an’ she married him, which we all reckon was a darned good thing. Now Curly is writin’ his funeral letter, after which he aims to get turrible drunk.”

  “Curly,” spoke up Jim, kindly.

  “Cain’t you leave me alone heah?” appealed the cowboy.

  “Yes, in a minute. Sorry to disturb you, old man. But I’ve news about Yellow Jacket, Jed Stone, and his Hash-Knife outfit.”

  “To hell with them! I’m a ruined cowboy. Soon as I get this document written I’m goin’ to town an’ look at red licker.”

  “Nope,” said Jim, laconically.

  “Wal, I jest am. Who says I cain’t?”

  “I do, Curly.”

  “But you’re not my boss. I’ve quit the Diamond. I’ll never fork a hoss again.”

  “Curly, you wouldn’t let us tackle that Hash-Knife gang without you?”

  “Jim, I cain’t care aboot nothin’. My heart’s broke. I could see you all shot. I could see Bud Chalfack hung on a tree an’ laugh.”

  “Curly, didn’t you and I get to be good friends?”

  “Shore. An’ I was durn proud of it. But friendship’s nuthin’ to love. Aw, Boss, I’m ashamed to face you with it...Caroline has turned out to be false. Chucked me fer thet bowlegged Stebbins puncher! Who’d ever thought I’d come to sech disgrace?”

  “Curly, it’s no disgrace. Wess is a good chap. He’ll make Caroline happy. You didn’t really love her.”

  “Wha-at!” roared Curly. And when his hearers all greeted this with a laugh he sank back crestfallen.

  “Curly, there’s some good reasons why you can’t throw down the Diamond at this stage,” said Jim, seriously, and placed a kindly hand on the cowboy’s shoulder.

  “Jest you give me one, Jim Traft,” blustered Curly, and he laid down his pencil.

  Jim knew perfectly well that this wonderful young Westerner could not be untrue to anyone. “First, then, Curly. You’ve already got a few head of stock on the range. In a few years you’ll be a rancher on your own account.”

  “No reason at all. I don’t want thet stock. I’d have given it to Bud if he hadn’t been so nasty aboot Caroline. Swore she’d finally come to her senses. Then I gave the cattle to Hump, heah.”

  “Well, Hump can give them back...Another reason is Uncle Jim is throwing us plumb against the Hash-Knife outfit. Now what would the Diamond amount to without Curly Prentiss?”

  “I don’t give a — a damn,” rejoined Curly. But it was a weak assertion.

  “See there, Boss,” yelled Bud, red in the face. “He hates us all jest because thet red-headed Carrie Bambridge chucked him.”

  “Curly, it’s just as well,” went on Jim. “Listen, and all of you. This is a secret and not to be spoken of except among ourselves. Uncle Jim is sure Bambridge is crooked. Making deals with the Hash-Knife.”

  All the cowboys except Curly expressed themselves in different degrees of exclamation.

  At length Curly spoke. “Even if Bainbridge was crooked — that’d make no difference to me.”

  “Did you ask Caroline to marry you?” queried Jim, kindly.

  “Dog-gone-it, no,” replied Curly, and here his fine, frank face flamed. “Boss, I never was sure I cared that much, till I lost her.”

  “Curly, it wasn’t the real thing — your case on Caroline.”

  “Ahuh. Jim, you haven’t given me any argument why I shouldn’t go out an’ drown my grief in the bottle — an’ shoot up the town — an’ kill somebody or get put in jail.”

  “No? All right. Here’s another reason,” replied Jim, and he drew a photograph out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of Curly.

  The cowboy started, bent over, and became absorbed in the picture.

  Bud Chalfack started, too, but Jim waved him back.

  “My Gawd! Boss, who is this?” asked Curly.

  “My sister, Gloriana May Traft.”

  “Your sister? — Jim, I shore ought to have seen the resemblance, though she’s ten million times better-lookin’ than you...But how is she a reason for my not goin’ to the bad?”

  “Curly, it’s as simple as pie,” said Jim. “Gloriana is a sick girl. She’s coming West for her health. She’ll arrive on Monday, on the Western Special. Now, I ask you, have you the heart to bust up the Diamond — to get drunk and worry me to death — when I’ve got this new trouble on my hands?”

  Curly took another long look at the photograph, and then he turned to Jim with all the clouds vanished from his eyes and face. To see Curly thus was to love him.

  “Boss, I haven’t got the heart to throw you down,” he replied. “It’s my great weakness — this heah heart of mine...I reckon I wasn’t goin’ to — anyhow...An’ I’ll go down to meet the Western Special with you.”

  Jim, if he had dared, could have yelled his mirth. How well he had known Curly.

  “Lemme see thet pictoor?” demanded Bud, advancing.

  Curly handed the photograph back to Jim, and said, blandly, “Bud, gulls of high degree shouldn’t interest you.”

  “Boys, I want you all to see Glory’s picture,” said Jim, calmly, though he revelled in the moment. “Come, take a look.”

  Bud and Jackson Way leaped forward; Uphill Frost forgot his crutch, Hump Stevens hopped out of his bunk; and they all, with Curly irresistibly drawn, crowded around Jim.

  The long silence that ensued attested to the beauty of Gloriana Traft.

  Finally Bud exploded: “Lord! ain’t she a looker?”

  “Prettier even than Molly Dunn,” added Way, as if that was the consummation of all beauty.

  “I never seen no angel till this minnit,” was Uphill Frost’s encomium.

  “Ef I jest wasn’t a crippled cowpuncher an’ had a million dollars!” exclaimed Hump Stevens, with a sigh. “Boss, her name fits her.”

  Curly Prentiss reacted peculiarly to all this. It seemed he resented the looks and sighs and fervid comments of his comrades, as if they had profaned a sacred face already enshrined in his impressionable heart.

  “Wal, I’m informin’ you gentlemen of the range thet I saw her first,” he said, loftily.

  Bud took that as an insult. Frost swore his surprise. Hump Stevens stared in silence. Jackson Way laughed at the superb and conceited cowboy. Then Curly addressed Jim. “Boss, it’s shore plain the Diamond will be busted now.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JIM DID NOT see much of Molly on Sunday. She kept to her room except at meal hours. He found opportunity however, to ask her to go into town with him on Monday to meet his sister.

  “I’d rather not, Jim,” she replied, as if her mind had long been made up. “She’d rather you didn’t fetch any girl, especially your girl, to meet her, thet’s shore.”

  “But why, Molly?” he queried.

  “It’ll be a surprise to her — the way things are with you an’ me. An’ it oughtn’t come the minute she gets heah.”

  “We don’t need to tell her right away.”

  “She’d see it...Jim, you should have written home weeks ago — to tell your folks aboot me.”

  “I suppose I ought. Really I meant to. Only I just didn’t write.”

  “Wal, I reckon it’d be better not to let her know right away. I could hide it. But I’m shore afraid you couldn’t. Uncle Jim will blurt it out.”

  “Molly! The idea — not telling Gloriana we’re engaged,” he protested, mystified by her gravity.

  “Jim, it’ll be all right if only she takes to me, but if she’s like you when you first struck Flag — she won’t.”

  “I was pretty much of a snob,” he admitted. “Molly, I’m the better for all I’ve gone through...You realise, don’t you, how much I—”

  The entrance of Molly’s mother prohibited the rest of that tender speech. And Jim presently left the living-room perturbed in mind. He could not rid himself of a premonition that Gloriana’s coming heralded disaster. No further opportunity to speak privately to Molly presented itself that day; and early Monday morning Molly trudged off to school like any country girl, wading through the snow. How serious she was about her studies!

  In the afternoon Jim sent for Curly Prentiss, who appeared as if by magic, most gorgeously arrayed in the gayest and finest of cowboy habiliments.

  “For goodness’ sake? Why this togging up?” exclaimed Jim.

  Curly appeared to be labouring under stress.

  “Had hell with the outfit,” he said. “Come near punchin’ Bud. He swore I ought to wear a plain suit — which is somethin’ I don’t own — but I’m no business man, or even a rancher yet. An’ I want to look what I am.”

  “Oh, you mean you want my sister Gloriana to see you’re a real cowboy?”

  “Shore do.”

  “Big hat, gun, spurs, and all?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Well, Curly, she’ll see you all right. She could see you a mile away.”

  “Jim, don’t you give me any of your chin aboot how I look. I had enough from Bud an’ Jack an’ Uphill. An’ my feelin’s are hurt...They’re goin’ to meet thet train, all of them except Hump. He wanted us to carry him on a stretcher. Up is goin’ on a crutch — the damn fool!”

  “Fine. The sooner you all see Gloriana May the sooner you’ll be miserable...I’ve ordered the buckboard to meet the train. Let’s walk in, Curly, and stop to see Slinger.”

  “It’s a good idea. A little movin’ around might steady me. I’d shore hate to meet Jed Stone or thet Pecos gun-thrower.”

  Their long steps soon brought them to the edge of town and eventually the modest hospital, which, unpretentious as it was, had become the boast of cowboys.

  They found Slinger Dunn the only inmate, besides an attendant or two, and he was limping up and down a warm and comfortable room. His dark face, bronze and smooth like an Indian’s wreathed into a smile at sight of his visitors. He had gained since Jim had last seen him. His long hair, black as the wing of a crow, hung down over the collar of the loose woollen dressing-gown he wore, in which obviously he felt ill at ease. Jim always thrilled at sight of Slinger, and had reason to do so, beyond appreciation of his striking figure and piercing eyes. Anyone who had ever seen Molly Dunn would at once connect Slinger with her.

  “Howdy, boys! It’s aboot time you was comin’,” he drawled. “Molly came in on her way to school, or I’d shore be daid now.”

  “Patience, Slinger. Why, you’ve made a marvellous recovery!” said Jim, cheerily.

  “Slinger, you backwoods son-of-a-gun, only five weeks ago you was a sieve of bullet holes,” declared Curly. “An’ heah you can walk aboot.”

  “Wal, it’s easy fer you fellars to talk, but I’d like to see you stand stayin’ heah. Day after day — night after night. Thet damn Doc won’t give me any more cigarettes an’ only a nip of whisky. Set down, boys, an’ tell me some news.”

  “Slinger, just as soon as you can ride we’re off for Yellow Jacket,” announced Jim.

  “Wal, pack up fer tomorrow mawnin’.”

  “Not till after Thanksgiving. Three weeks yet. And now listen.” Whereupon Jim related all the late news and rumours about the Hash-Knife outfit.

  “Shore, I’d expect thet of Jed Stone,” said Dunn. “An’, Boss, if you want to know, I’ve long had a hunch Bambridge is back of the Hash-Knife.”

  “No!” ejaculated Jim, aghast at so definite a statement from this backwoodsman.

  “Slinger, we reckon you mean Bambridge ain’t above buyin’ a few haid of stock from Stone now an’ then?” queried Curly, slow and cool, but his blue eyes flashed fire.

  “Hell no! Buyin’ a few steers nuthin’,” drawled Dunn, forcibly. “Bambridge’s outlayin’ ranch is across the divide from Yellow Jacket. Thirty miles around by road. But by the canyon — Doubtful we call it — there’s less’n ten miles. An’ Bambridge is gettin’ stock through Doubtful an’ drivin’ it to Maricopa.”

  Curly whistled his amazement. Jim simply stared. This was getting down to hard pan. It did not occur to either of them to question Slinger Dunn.

  “Shore, I can’t prove it, Jim,” he continued. “But it’s what I reckon. An my hunch is fer us to keep our traps shet — an’ go down to Yellow Jacket to make shore.”

  “Right, you bet,” agreed Curly. “But if it’s true, the Hash-Knife will stop operations until either they or the Diamond are settled.”

  “We’ve got to find out,” interposed Jim emphatically. “Ring Locke advised against Uncle sending the Diamond on that job. Said we could do easier and more important work. He’s afraid Bambridge might shoot Uncle.”

  “Wal, there’s shore risk of thet,” rejoined Dunn. “But Traft could keep out of the way. When we get the trick on these fellars we can do a little shootin’ ourselves...You know, Boss, there ain’t no other way oot of it.”

  “So Uncle says,” assented Jim, gloomily. “Slinger, you don’t think it’ll be another Pleasant Valley War?”

  “Lord, no,” declared Dunn, showing his white teeth. “Thet war hed hundreds of sheepmen an’ cattlemen behind it, with rustlers on the side of the sheep fellars. This heah deal is a matter of a little gunplay.”

  “Slinger, you’ve got a lot of time to think it over,” said Jim. “Do so, and I’ll come in after a few days. I’m a little upset just now. My sister is coming today. She’s ill. They say the climate will agree with her.”

  “Thet’s too bad, Boss. But mebbe it’ll all turn oot right...Molly never told me you hed a sister. I reckon I know how you feel.”

  “Here’s her picture, Slinger,” said Jim, producing the photograph and handing it over.

  “Wal, I never before seen any girl or a pictoor of one thet could beat Molly. But this heah shore does.”

  “Molly is totally unlike Gloriana. Just as pretty in her way, I think,” he said, stoutly.

  “Boss, you’re loco. Molly is a slick, soft, pretty little woodmouse. But this sister of yourn is like the sun in the mawnin’.”

  Jim felt a surprise he did not betray. The compliment to Gloriana at Molly’s expense did not find great favour with Jim. Receiving the picture back, he took a look at it, somehow seeing Glory differently, and then he returned it to his pocket.

  “It was taken a year ago,” he explained. “And if Gloriana has improved in looks since I’ve been gone as much as she did the year before — whew! but she’ll be something to look at. I hardly expect improvement, though, since she has been ill.”

  “Huh! Thet gurl couldn’t be ailin’,” returned Dunn, positively.

  Conversation reverted to other channels then — the Diamond, the incompleted drift fence, winter, horses — until finally Jim rose to go, with Curly following suit.

  “Slinger, I’m awful glad you’re doing so well,” said Jim.

  “Wal, you fellars have cheered me right pert. Come again soon...An’, Jim, would you mind lettin’ me borrow thet pictoor fer a spell? I get hells rattlin’ lonesome — an’ it’d be good to look at.”