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“You —- —- ——–!” swore Spikes Weber, coming truculently forward, hand to hip. He was of medium height and stockily built, with the bull neck and little, deep-set eyes that go often with a nature quarrelsome.

Weary still leaned his elbow on the bar and smiled at him tolerantly. “Feel bad anywhere?” he wanted to know, when the other was very close.

Spikes Weber, from very surprise, stopped and regarded Weary for a space before he began swearing again. His hand was still at his hip, but the gun it touched remained in his pocket. Plainly, he had not expected just this attitude.

Weary waited, smothering a yawn, until the other finished a particularly pungent paragraph. “A good jolt uh brandy ‘ll sometimes cure a bad case uh colic,” he remarked. “Better have our friend here fix yuh up–but it’ll be on you. I ain’t paying for drinks just now.”

Spikes snorted and began upon the pedigree and general character of Irish. Weary took his elbow off the bar, and his eyes lost their sunniness and became a hard blue, darker than was usual. It took a good deal to rouse Weary to the fighting point, and it is saying much for the tongue of Spikes that Weary was roused thoroughly.

“That’ll be about enough,” he said sharply, cutting short a sentence from the other. “I kinda hated to start in and take yuh all to pieces–but yuh better saw off right there, or I can’t be responsible–“

A gun barrel caught the light menacingly, and Weary sprang like the pounce of a cat, wrested the gun from the hand of Spikes and rapped him smartly over the head with the barrel. “Yuh would, eh?” he snarled, and tossed the gun upon the bar, where the bartender caught it as it slid along the smooth surface and put it out of reach.

After that, chairs went spinning out of the way, and glasses jingled to the impact of a body striking the floor with much force. Came the slapping sound of hammering fists and the scuffling of booted feet, together with the hard breathing of fighting men.

Spikes, on his back, looked up into the blazing eyes he thought were the eyes of Irish and silently acknowledged defeat. But Weary would not let it go at that.

“Are yuh whipped to a finish, so that yuh don’t want any more trouble with anybody?” he wanted to know.

Spikes hesitated but the fraction of a second before he growled a reluctant yes.

“Are yuh a low-down, lying sneak of a woman-fighter, that ain’t got nerve enough to stand up square to a ten-year-old boy?”

Spikes acknowledged that he was. Before the impromptu catechism was ended, Spikes had acknowledged other and more humiliating things–to the delectation of the bartender, the stage driver and two or three men of leisure who were listening.

When Spikes had owned to being every mean, unknowable thing that Weary could call to mind–and his imagination was never of the barren sort–Weary generously permitted him to get upon his feet and skulk out to where his horse was tied. After that, Weary gave his unruffled attention to the stage driver and discovered the unwelcome fact that there was no letter and no telegram for one William Davidson, who looked a bit glum when he heard it.

So he, too, went out and mounted Glory and rode away to the ranch where waited the horses; and as he went he thought, for perhaps the first time in his life, some hard and unflattering things of Chip Bennett. He had never dreamed Chip would calmly overlook his needs and leave him in the lurch like this.

At the ranch, when he had unsaddled Glory and gone to the bunk-house, he discovered Irish, Pink and Happy Jack wrangling amicably over whom a certain cross-eyed girl on the train had been looking at most of the time. Since each one claimed all the glances for himself, and since there seemed no possible way of settling the dispute, they gave over the attempt gladly when Weary appeared, and wanted to know, first thing, who or what had been gouging the hide off his face.