2
XIII Another Letter 130 XIV A Rumble Of War 137 XV A Mutual Benefit Association 146 XVI Wherein A Woman Lies 151 XVII Justice Vs. Law 155 XVIII Law Invoked and Defied 169 XIX A Woman Rides in Vain 183 XX And Rides Again--in Vain 192 XXI Another Woman Rides 209 XXII A Man Errs--and Pays 221 XXIII First Principles 234 XXIV Another Woman Lies 253 XXV In the Dark 264 XXVI The Ashes 273 XXVII The Fight 290 XXVIII The Dregs 310 XXIX The Calm 321
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Instinctively each knew the other for a foe. Frontispiece
"You are going to marry me--some day. That's what I think of you!" 97
"You men are blind. Corrigan is a crook who will stop at nothing." 283
CHAPTER I
THE RIDER OF THE BLACK HORSE
The trail from the Diamond K broke around the base of a low hill dotted thickly with scraggly oak and fir, then stretched away, straight and almost level (except for a deep cut where the railroad gang and a steam shovel were eating into a hundred-foot hill) to Manti. A month before, there had been no Manti, and six months before that there had been no railroad. The railroad and the town had followed in the wake of a party of khaki-clad men that had made reasonably fast progress through the country, leaving a trail of wooden stakes and little stone monuments behind. Previously, an agent of the railroad company had bartered through, securing a right-of-way. The fruit of the efforts of these men was a dark gash on a sun-scorched level, and two lines of steel laid as straight as skilled eye and transit could make them--and Manti.
Manti could not be overlooked, for the town obtruded upon the vision from where "Brand" Trevison was jogging along the Diamond K trail astride his big black horse, Nigger. Manti dominated the landscape, not because it was big and imposing, but because it was new. Manti's buildings were scattered--there had been no need for crowding; but from a di