"Panhandle, are you going to stay here in Marco?" she inquired, leaning on her white round arms.

"Yes, if I find my folks," he replied simply. "They lost all they had--ranch, cattle, horses--and moved out here. I never knew until I went back home. Makes me feel pretty mean. But Dad was doing well when I left home."

"Mother--sister, too?"

"Yes. And my sister Alice must be quite a girl now," mused Pan.

"And you're going to help them?" she asked softly.

"I should smile," said Pan feelingly.

"Then, you mustn't buy drinks for me--or run after me--as I was going to make you do."

Pan was at a loss for a reply to that frank statement. And as he gazed at her, conscious of a subtle change, someone pounded him on the back and then fell on his neck.

"My Gawd--if heah ain't Panhandle!" burst out a husky voice.

Pan got up as best he could, and pulled free from the fellow. The voice had prepared Pan for an old acquaintance, and when he saw that lean red face and blue eyes he knew them.

"Well, I'll be darned. Blinky Moran! You son of a gun! Drunk--the same as when I saw you last."

"Aw, Pan, I ain't jes drunk," he replied. "Mebbe I was--but shein'

you--ole pard--my Gawd! It's like cold sweet water on my hot face."

"Blink, I'm sure glad to see you, drunk or sober," replied Pan warmly.

"What're you doing out here?"

Moran braced himself, not without the help of his hold upon Pan, and it was evident that this meeting had roused him.

"Pan, meet my pard heah," he began, indicating a stalwart young man in overalls and high boots. "Gus Hans, puncher of Montana."

Pan shook hands with the grinning cowboy.

"Pard, yore shakin' the paw of Panhandle Smith," announced Moran in solemn emotion. "This heah's the boy, frens. You've heerd me rave many's the time. He was my pard, my bunkmate, my brother. We rode the Cimarron together, an' the Arkansaw, an' we was the only straight punchers in the Long Bar C outfit that was drove out of Wyomin'....

His beat never forked a hoss or coiled a rope. An' sh.o.r.er'n h.e.l.l, pard, I'd been a rustler but fer Panhandle. More'n onct he throwed his gun fer me an--"

"Say, Blink, I'll have to choke you," interrupted Pan, laughing. "Now, you meet my friends here, Miss Louise--and Charley Brown."

Pan did not miss the effect the bright-eyed red-lipped girl made upon the cowboys, especially Moran who, he remembered, had always succ.u.mbed easily to feminine charms.

"Blinky, you've been drinking too much to dance with a lady," presently remarked Louise.

"Wal, now, Miss, I'm as sober as Panhandle there," replied Moran ardently.

She shook her curly head smilingly and, rising from the table, went round to Pan and leaned up to him with both wistfulness and recklessness in her face.

"Panhandle Smith, I'll leave you to your friends," she said. "But don't you drift in here again--for if you do--I'll forget my sacrifice for little Alice.... There!"

She kissed him square on the lips and ran off without a backward glance.

Blinky fell into a chair, overcome with some unusual kind of emotion.

He stared comically at Pan.

"Say, ole pard, you used to be shy of skirts!" he expostulated.

"Reckon I am yet, for all the evidence," retorted Pan, half amused and half angry at the unexpected move of the girl.

Charley Brown joined in the mirth at Pan's expense.

"Guess the drinks are on me," he said. "And they'll be the last."

"Pan, thet there girl is Louie Melliss!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Moran.

"Is it? Well, who in the deuce is she?"

"Say, cowboy, quit your foolin'!"

"Honest, I never saw or heard of the young lady till a few minutes ago.

Ask Brown."

"That's a fact," corroborated Brown, thus appealed to. "She's the belle of this h.e.l.l. Sure, Smith, you savvy that?"

"No," rejoined Pan bluntly. He began to fear he had been rather thickheaded. "I've holed up in a few gambling h.e.l.ls where drinks and sc.r.a.ps went pretty lively. But this is the first one for me where there were a lot of half-naked girls."

"You're west of the Rockies, now," replied Brown, grimly. "An' you'll soon find that out in more ways than one.... Louie Melliss is straight from Frisco, an' chain-lightnin' to her fingertips, so they say. Been some bad messes over her. But they say too, she's as white an' square as any good woman."

"Aw! ... Reckon I'm pretty much of a tenderfoot," returned Pan. His regret was for the pretty audacious girl whose boldness of approach he had not understood.

"For Gawd's sake, pard," began Moran, recovering from his shock.

"Don't you come ridin' around heah fer thet little devil to get stuck on you. She's sh.o.r.e agoin' to give young Hardman a bootiful trimmin'.

An' let her do it!"

"Oh. So you don't care much about young Hardman?" inquired Pan with interest. He certainly felt that he was falling into news.

"I'd like to throw a gun on him an' onct I d.a.m.n near done it," declared Moran.

"What for?"

"He an' another fellar jumped the only claim I ever struck thet showed any color," went on the cowboy with an earnestness that showed excitement had sobered him. "I went back one mawnin' an' there was Hardman an' a miner named Purcell. They ran me off, swore it was their claim. Purcell said he'd worked it before an' sold it to Jard Hardman.

Thet's young Hardman's dad, an' he wouldn't fit in any square hole. I went to Matthews an' raised a holler. But I couldn't prove nothin'....

An' by Gawd, Pan, thet claim is a mine now, payin' well."

"Tough luck, Blink. You always did have the darndest luck.... Say, Brown, is that sort of deal worked often?"

"Common as dirt, in the early days of a find," replied Brown. "I haven't heard of any claim jumpin' just lately, though. It's somethin'

like rustlin' cattle. You know most every cowman now and then picks up some unbranded stock that he knows isn't his. But he takes it along.

Now claim jumpin' is somethin' like that. If a fellar leaves his claim for a day or a week he's liable to come back an' find some one has jumped it. I never leave mine in the daytime, an' I have witnesses to that."