handle him with one hand. The turnout looked as if undoubtedly a few hundred dollars could be depended on somewhere about the man, or one or the other of the women, or the car.
The second man had straightened up and said slowly: “One man and two women. Are the Janes young and likely looking?”
All the blood in James MacFarlane had rushed to his head, and then back to his hands and feet, where fighting blood is most at home. He was no longer a sick soldier dependent on the mercy of a passing stranger. His stomach was fortified with the potatoes and the meat and the coffee and the bread that smiling Ann Brunson had shared with him. He had drunk the water that laughing little Susan had brought to him, and bathed his tired face in it. He had no doubt but money to pay the expenses of the journey was in the pockets of one of the party. They had earned it by hard work on a farm. They had gone pleasuring as was their right, and so far they had had a pleasant time, but if they were to be robbed of their money, if William Brunson were to be beaten to insensibility or killed, if the women who had befriended Jamie were to be left to the mercy of these two in the canyon before him, then there was something very worth while in the world remaining for him to do, or at least to give what life he had left in attempting to do.
So, like a snake over the stones, he drew himself together and felt with a long arm for a big piece of loose rock, and when the precise moment arrived at which the
