Peck had his feathers up properly; he was in a fighting frame. It had taken him a little while to come to the conclusion that he was being made the subject of a conspiracy, the purpose of which was to disgrace him and drive him away from his amorous quest. There was fire in his lobster eyes, the flush of defiance in his face.
"I come from a place where you've got to show 'em," he said as they jogged back toward the fence. "You can't pull any of your bluffs on me. You ain't got no better men out here than where I come from. They ain't makin' 'em any more."
Rawlins was not altogether unsympathetic, nuisance that the fellow was, knowing he was not solely to blame for being there in the character of gallant to the sheeplands belle. He had been led up to it; there was something just a bit too drastic in this method of getting rid of him.
There was no question of the danger Peck walking or running his long neck into if he cut the wire and rode for the hill Tippie had pointed out as the goal. That fence-rider had a mean eye; he would be as sore as a scald to-day in his resentment of the affront he had suffered yesterday, and only too keen to take it out of somebody who looked at a distance like a sheep-
