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 pricked her to considerable show of interest. Her languid eyes opened wide; signs of trouble appeared on her shallow forehead.

"Well, he ain't come," she said, with a twang of vindictive meanness. "I guess he's foolin' along somewhere on the road. You said he give you a job?"

Simpson explained again the condition on which he had hooked up with Coburn's outfit on the train. He thought it best to leave all other explanations to Coburn, saying nothing at all about the fight or the trouble he unwittingly had run himself into by taking the wrong horse.

No doubt Coburn was tearing around over the country looking for him, Simpson thought, contemptuous of the cowman's wild belief that he had been robbed. How would he take it when he came home and found his handbag and everything else in the sack? That remained to be seen. Mrs. Coburn said if he wanted to wait around until her husband came he could stay "back there," vaguely indicating the region behind the house.

From experience Simpson knew about what he would find. The men's quarters were neither better nor worse than he had expected. The bunk-house was in keeping with the rest of the place, which was bare, trodden, rundown and slovenly. Coburn was a cattleman, first and last; not a home-maker in any sense. His house was a low, gloomy sod affair, little more than a hut, witha lean-to of vertical planks slammed hit-or-miss up against one end. A smoking stovepipe sticking through the roof of this apartment identified it as the kitchen. Where that woman and her five children kept themselves when they