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 Tippie turned with a start so sudden and threatening that Rawlins caught him by the shoulder and pressed him back against the door.

"Ya-a-a! you can't run none of your sandines on me!" said Peck, leering and goggling in his feeling of security. "You tried to git me shot up, you tried to bluff me out of here, but I turned the trick on you, I punctured your sausage. I've had enough of you—you're fired. And you too, Rawlins. You're both fired. You git to the doodle—you git to—hell out of here!"

"Tut, tut, Mr. Peck; tut, tut!" said Rawlins, with ladylike remonstrance, greatly entertained by Peck's effort to show himself a real rough sort of sheepman with warts on his neck.

"Does that go?" Tippie inquired, turning to Mrs. Peck.

"He's the head of the fam'ly; what he says goes," Mrs. Peck replied, enforcing the decision by a solemn nod.

"All right," said Tippie, "but there's goin' to be a clean-up around here before I go."

He knocked the fiery charge out of his pipe against the palm of his hard hand, spilled the embers on the floor and smothered them with his foot. Mrs. Peck understood the movement as a preliminary to a charge that must end in the overthrow and humiliation of Peck. She grinned, winked, held up a placating hand.

"What he says goes—just so fur," she said. "He's fired you, Elmer, but I've hired you over. I need you. Go ahead with your work the way you always have. But that don't go with Mr. Rawlins," she supple-