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122 I'd almost rather take a good two fisted licking than kill some poor devil."

"Huh!" grunted Turk, staring at him. "You haven't got mauled yet today by them guys, though." As they went on down through the boulders, it appeared that Turk had had an ankle badly turned in the fight with Johnnie Thorp and his two companions, and now limping his best, he fell behind the eager Steele.

"Wait, can't you?" he expostulated over and over. "Oh, damn it, don't be a hawg, Steele. I got a right to be in on this from the jump." "You've had more than your share already," grinned Steele over his shoulder.

The brief struggle with the man who now lay cursing on the plateau behind him, coming all unexpectedly, had set his blood racing, his pulses hammering. Not in anger … there had been scant time for anger and he had never so much as laid eyes upon the bulk of Johnnie Thorp before … but impelled by the sheer force of immediate necessity, had he driven his fist into a man's face. Now, still not in anger, but in wonderment and with rising, solidifying determination in every heart beat, he strode on to demand a reckoning of the two men who waited for him, facing the other way in the lower trail. His rifle he carried loosely in his hand, trusting that if he were forced to use it at all it might be as a club merely. At the moment the emotion riding him was purely pleasurable; in the man like Bill Steele there lives on to the last the boy who loves a fair fight.

On the rim of the little meadow where his freed horse now browsed Steele saw them. Two men, one stretched