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 it seemed. The animal jumped, and reared against the hard rein the young man pulled to restrain it.

"You may be a big gunman where you come from," Bob said, fury in his face, hand on his pistol, "but you don't look big enough to throw a scare into me!"

The elder Hughes stopped this foolish bid for trouble by lifting his hand in the commanding gesture of silence that seemed so potent between father and son. The young fellow subsided, but sat there scowling, hand on his gun, a good deal more bluff than earnest in the whole demonstration, for a man in hotter pickle of passion than he could have seen that Dunham had no intention of taking up any quarrel between them.

"I've heard a good deal of talk about fightin' your way through," Dunham said, addressing the elder man, maybe just a tinge of slight and depreciation in his tone. "When are you goin' to start?"

"If we didn't have anything but ourselves to take across that river we'd go," Hughes replied, his look fixed on the cottonwoods which marked the stream.

"Nobody would object in that case," Dunham reminded him. "That would be easy enough. But it happens you've got a million or so cows—"

"Four thousand," Hughes corrected the extravagant estimate.

"They look like at least a million to me," said Bill. "The next thing is, what are you goin' to do about it?"

"Men can't put up a fight against three or four to one, and it would be that if I could fetch all of mine up to the front, and ford a herd of cattle across a tricky river at the same time," Hughes replied to this not very