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 "You're talkin' kind of careless, it seems to me, pardner. You git to hell out of that car and put them bones back, and you do it damn quick!"

"I left a load of bones beside the track a few days ago, and I come back to find them in your car," Tom told him, not greatly moved by the blustering order. "When I've loaded that wagon I'll come out—unless you get too damn nasty about it."

"You'll have a sweet time provin' title to a load of bones!"

"Not at all," Tom corrected him. "I expected some damn thief would try to get away with them, and I marked a lot of them—here—look at that, you bloomin' pirate!"

Tom tossed a skull across the wagon. On the forehead it bore the pencilled brand of the Block E ranch. The lumberman threw it down with a sneer, but a flush that was not all due to virtue overspread his face.

"You've had time to mark a hundred of 'em," he said. "You can't git away with that in this man's town!"

The man's manner was portentous of trouble. He spoke with that big threat, that bullying certainty, of a boy who knows his parent will take up his row. Tom did not stop to argue the case any longer. He resumed the job of filling his wagon with bones, the lumberman watching him with malignant scowl a little while. He appeared to be standing there to get his resentment up to the fighting pitch by witnessing this high-handed work of a man who would not conform to the established usage of that town, under which a man pocketed his loss and rode away, charging it up to the expense of a sucker's education.