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“I’ll get at that d—-d skunk Brown, who’s back of him,” said Dexter Rice.

“And what then?” persisted Jackson, with a certain show of independence. “If this stuff belongs to the girl, I’m not certain I shan’t give them up without any fuss. Lord! I want nothing but what the old man left me–and certainly nothing of HERS.”

Here Ned Wyngate was heard to murmur that Jackson was one of those men who would lie down and let coyotes crawl over him if they first presented a girl’s visiting card, but he was stopped by Rice demanding paper and pencil. The former being torn from a memorandum book, and a stub of the latter produced from another pocket, he wrote as follows:–

SIR,–In reply to the hogwash you have kindly exuded in your letter of to-day, I have to inform you that you can have what you ask for Miss Wells, and perhaps a trifle on your own account, by calling this afternoon on–Yours truly–

“Now, sign it,” continued Rice, handing him the pencil.

“But this will look as if we were angry and wanted to keep the plants,” protested Wells.

“Never you mind, sonny, but sign! Leave the rest to your partners, and when you lay your head on your pillow to-night return thanks to an overruling Providence for providing you with the right gang of ruffians to look after you!”

Wells signed reluctantly, and Wyngate offered to find a Chinaman in the gulch who would take the missive. “And being a Chinaman, Brown can do any cussin’ or buck talk THROUGH him!” he added.

The afternoon wore on; the tall Douglas pines near the water pools wheeled their long shadows round and halfway up the slope, and the sun began to peer into the faces of the reclining men. Subtle odors of mint and southern-wood, stragglers from the garden, bruised by their limbs, replaced the fumes of their smoked-out pipes, and the hammers of the woodpeckers were busy in the grove as they lay lazily nibbling the fragrant leaves like peaceful ruminants. Then came the sound of approaching wheels along the invisible highway beyond the buckeyes, and then a halt and silence. Rice rose slowly, bright pin points in the pupils of his gray eyes.

“Bringin’ a wagon with him to tote the hull shanty away,” suggested Wyngate.

“Or fetched his own ambulance,” said Briggs.

Nevertheless, after a pause, the wheels presently rolled away again.

“We’d better go and meet him at the gate,” said Rice, hitching his revolver holster nearer his hip. “That wagon stopped long enough to put down three or four men.”

They walked leisurely but silently to the gate. It is probable that none of them believed in a serious collision, but now the prospect had enough possibility in it to quicken their pulses. They reached the gate. But it was still closed; the road beyond it empty.

“Mebbe they’ve sneaked round to the cabin,” said Briggs, “and are holdin’ it inside.”

They were turning quickly in that direction, when Wyngate said, “Hush!–some one’s there in the brush under the buckeyes.”

They listened; there was a faint rustling in the shadows.

“Come out o’ that, Brown–into the open. Don’t be shy,” called out Rice in cheerful irony. “We’re waitin’ for ye.”

But Briggs, who was nearest the wood, here suddenly uttered an exclamation,–“B’gosh!” and fell back, open-mouthed, upon his companions. They too, in another moment, broke into a feeble laugh, and lapsed against each other in sheepish silence. For a very pretty girl, handsomely dressed, swept out of the wood and advanced towards them.

Even at any time she would have been an enchanting vision to these men, but in the glow of exercise and sparkle of anger she was bewildering. Her wonderful hair, the color of freshly hewn redwood, had escaped from her hat in her passage through the underbrush, and even as she swept down upon them in her majesty she was jabbing a hairpin into it with a dexterous feminine hand.