Before David Slosson was aware of her purpose, and its accomplishment, his racing horse, still uneducated of mouth, had carried him thirty or forty yards beyond the spot where Hazel had jumped the stream. At length, however, he contrived to pull the youngster up.

He smiled as he saw the girl on the other side of the stream. He remembered her suggestion of the bridge, and he shut his teeth with a snap. The stream was narrower here, so he had an advantage which, he believed, she had miscalculated. He took his horse back some distance and galloped at the stream. Hazel sat watching him with a smile, just beyond where he should land. His horse shuffled its feet as it came up to the bank. Then it lifted. Slosson clung to the horn of the saddle.

Then the horse landed, stumbled, fell, hurling its rider headlong in a perfect quagmire of swamp.

Slosson gathered himself up, a mass of mud and pretty well wet through.

Hazel was out of the saddle in a moment and offering him assistance with every expression of concern. She came to the edge of the swamp and reached out her quirt. The man ignored it. He ignored her, and scrambled to dry ground without assistance.

"I told you to take the bridge," Hazel cried shamelessly. "You knew you were on a young horse. Oh dear, dear! What a terrible muss you're in. My, but my daddy will be angry with me for--for letting this happen."

Her apparently genuine concern slightly mollified the man.

"I thought you were putting up another bluff at me, Miss Hazel," he said, still angrily. "Say, you best quit bluffing me. I don't take 'em from anybody."

"Bluff? Why, Mr. Slosson, I couldn't bluff you. I--I warned you.

Same as I did about the cat-jumping your horse put up. Say, this is just dreadful. We'll have to get right back, and get you dried out and cleaned. I guess that horse is too young for a--city man. I ought to have given you Sunset. He'd have jumped that stream a mile--if you wanted him to. Say--there, I'll have to round up your horse, he's making for home."

In a moment Hazel was in the saddle again, and the man alternately watched her and scraped the thick mud off his clothes.

He was decidedly angry. His pride was outraged. But even these things began to pass as he noted the ease and skill with which she rounded up the runaway horse. She was doing all she could to help him out, and the fact helped to further mollify him. After all, she _had_ warned him to take the bridge. Perhaps he had been too ready to see a bluff in what she had suggested. After all, why should she attempt to bluff him? He remembered how powerful he was to affect her father's interests, and took comfort from it.

She came back with the horse and dismounted.

"Say," she cried, in dismay, "that dandy suit of yours. It's all mussed to death. I'm real sorry, Mr. Slosson. My word, won't my daddy be angry."

The man began to smile under the girl's evident distress, and, his temper recovered, his peculiar nature promptly reasserted itself.

"Say, Miss Hazel--oh, hang the 'miss.' You owe me something for this, you do, an' I don't let folks owe me things long."

"Owe?" Hazel's face was blankly astonished.

"Sure." The man eyed her in an unmistakable fashion.

Suddenly the girl began to laugh. She pointed at him.

"Guess we'll need to get you home and cleaned down some before we talk of anything else I owe. That surely is something I owe you. Here, you get up into the saddle. I'll hold your horse, he's a bit scared.

We'll talk of debts as we ride back."

But Slosson was in no mood to be denied just now. Although his anger had abated, he felt that Hazel was not to go free of penalty. He came to her as though about to take the reins from her hand, but, instead, he thrust out an arm to seize her by the waist.

Then it was that a curious thing happened. The young horse suddenly jumped backwards, dragging the girl with it out of the man's reach. It had responded to the swift flick of Hazel's quirt, and left the man without understanding, and his amorous intentions quite unsatisfied.

The next moment the girl was in her own saddle and laughing down at him.

"I forgot," she cried, "you'd just hate to have your horse held by a--girl. You best hurry into the saddle, or you'll contract lung trouble in all that wet."

Slosson cursed softly. But he knew that she was beyond his reach in the saddle. A tacit admission that, at least here, on the ranch, she dominated the situation.

"And I've never been able to show you those beeves, and convince you about ranching," Hazel sighed regretfully later on, as they rode back towards the ranch. But her sigh was sham and her heart was full of laughter.

She was thinking of the delight she would witness in Gordon's eyes, when he beheld the much besmirched suit of this man, to whom he had taken such a dislike.

CHAPTER XII

THINKING HARD

The days slipped by with great rapidity. They passed far too rapidly for Gordon. The expectation of Silas Mallinsbee that David Slosson would eventually listen to reason, and accept terms for himself similar to those agreeable to him on behalf of the railroad, showed no sign of maturing. The firmness of his front in no way seemed to affect the grafting agent, and from day to day, although the rancher and his assistant waited patiently for a definite _denouement_, nothing occurred to hold out promise one way or another. Mallinsbee said very little, but he watched events with wide-open eyes, and not altogether without hope that the man would be brought to reason. His eyes were on Hazel, smiling appreciation, for Hazel was at work using every art of which she was capable to frustrate any opposition to her father's plans, and to help on, as she described it, the "good work."

"I'm a 'sharper' in this, Mr. Van Henslaer," she declared, in face of one of Gordon's frequent protests. "I'm no better than David Slosson.

And I--I want you to understand that. I think your ideas of chivalry are just too sweet, but I want you to look with my eyes. We're a bunch of most ordinary folk who want to win out. If you and my daddy thought by burying him, dead or alive, you could beat his hand, why, I guess it would take an express locomotive to stop you. Well, I'm out to try and put him out of harm's way in my own fashion. If I can't do it, why, he'll find I'm not the dandy prairie flower he's figuring I am just now. That's all. So meanwhile get on with any old plans you can find up your sleeve. By hook or _crook_ we've _got_ to make good."

By this expression of the girl's extraordinary determination doubtless Gordon should have been silenced. But he was not silenced, nor anything like it. The truth was he was in love--wildly, passionately, jealously in love. It nearly drove him to distraction to watch the way in which, almost daily, this man Slosson drove out to see Hazel and take her out for buggy rides or horse riding. Not only that, he and her father were practically ignored by the man. They were just so much furniture in the office, and when by any chance the agent did deign to notice them there was generally something offensive in his manner of address.

Worst of all, as the outcome of Hazel's campaign there were no signs that matters were one whit advanced towards the successful completion of their project, and the days had already grown into weeks. All Gordon could do was to busy himself with formulating wild and impossible schemes for beating this creature. And a hundred and one strenuous possibilities occurred to him, all of which, however, offered no suggestion of bending the man, only of breaking him. The sum and substance of all his efforts was a deadly yearning to kill David Slosson, kill him so dead as to spoil forever his chances of resurrection.

This was much the position when, nearly three weeks later, in response to a peremptory note from Slosson in the morning, Silas Mallinsbee decided that Gordon should deal with him on a business visit in the afternoon.

Oh yes, Gordon would interview him. Gordon would deal with him.

Gordon would love it above all things. Was he given a free hand?

But Mallinsbee smiled into the fiery eyes of the young giant and shook his head, while Hazel looked on at the brewing storm with inscrutable eyes of amusement.

"There's no free hand for anybody in this thing, Gordon, boy," said Mallinsbee slowly. "And I don't guess there's any crematoriums or undertakers' corporation around Snake's Fall. Anyway, Hip-Lee wouldn't do a thing if you asked him to bury a white man."

"White man?" snorted Gordon furiously.

"Remember you're--fighting for my daddy as well as yourself, Mr. Van Henslaer," said Hazel earnestly.

Gordon sighed.

"I'll remember," he said. And his two friends knew that the matter was safe in his hands.

Left alone in his office, Gordon endured an unpleasant hour after his dinner. It was not the thoughts of his coming interview that disturbed him. It was Hazel. It was of her he was always thinking, when not actually engaged upon any duty. Every day made his thoughts harder to bear.

For awhile he sat before his desk, leaning back in his chair, gazing blankly at the wooden wall opposite him. She was always the same to him; his worst fits of temper seemed to make no difference. She only smiled and humored or chided him as though he were some big, wayward child. Then the next moment she would ride off with this vermin Slosson, full of merry sallies and smiling graciousness, whom, he knew, if she had any right feeling at all, she must loathe and despise.

Well, if she did loathe him, she had a curious way of showing it.

He thrust his chair back with an angry movement, and walked off into the bedroom opening out of the office. He looked in. The neatness of it, the scent of fresh air pouring in through its open window, meant nothing to him. He saw none of the work of the guiding hand which, in preparing it, had provided for his comfort. Hip-Lee kept it clean and made his bed, the same as he cooked his food. It did not occur to Gordon to whom Hip-Lee was responsible.

There were pictures on the walls, and it never occurred to Gordon that these had been taken from Hazel's own bedroom at the ranch--for his enjoyment. Nor was he aware that the shaving-glass and table had been specially purchased by Hazel for his comfort. There were a dozen and one little comforts, none of which he realized had been added to the room since it had been set aside for his use.

He flung himself upon the bed, all regardless of the lace pillow-sham which had once had a place on Hazel's own bed. He was in that frame of mind when he only wanted to get through the hours before Hazel's sunny presence again returned to the office. He was angry with her. He was ready to think, did think, the hardest thoughts of her; but he longed, stupidly, foolishly longed for her return, although he knew that, with her return, fresh evidence of Slosson's attentions to her and of her acceptance of them would be forthcoming.

He was only allowed another ten minutes in which to enjoy his moody misery. At the end of that time he heard the rattle of wheels beyond the veranda, and sprang from his couch with the battle light shining in his eyes.

But disappointment awaited him. It was not Slosson who presented himself. It was the altogether cheerful face of Peter McSwain which appeared at the doorway.

"Say," he cried. Then he paused and glanced rapidly round the room.