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 them rotten cattle in here, we'll be right here to stop you."

"We'll come," Dunham said, ominously calm, "and we'll give you the best thirty men with pump-guns can deliver. Unless you back up and stay backed, there's goin' to be more than one funeral tomorrow, gentlemen. We're comin' over here not only ready to fight, but all set to stampede that herd over this range if we can't get it in any other way."

"You'll find one man that won't back up," the hairy Scotsman said.

And that was a stern fact, others averred, in various tints of individual expression, none of them subdued. Only Garland seemed to be thinking about the serious complications which could very well develop out of a fight, even though the Texans were strongly outnumbered. They had not expected it to come to a fight, when all was said, their reliance being in numbers to make their prohibition good.

The threat of a stampede was another thing to fix the thought of reasonable men like Garland. Even Moore had jumped when Dunham spoke of it. Such a stampede could be started by a few men; the turmoil of a fight would accelerate it, and all the men gathered there would be no more than a handful of chaff in the faces of those four thousand animals once they were beyond human restraint. They would run until they fell of exhaustion, fifteen miles, twenty-five miles, sowing their dreaded, mysterious plague far and wide.

Another thing to be considered was that Texas range-