off, grinning.

"Oh, of course, you provoking thing!" cried she, irately. "Might know
you'd pick on those squaw bushes. It is a mite too shady for 'em
where they are, but still they're doing pretty well, considering. I'm
satisfied--What's that?"

"That" was a horseman appearing suddenly among the cottonwoods that
belted with a scattering grove the garden and the spring. The horseman
was Lanpher, manager of the 88 ranch. He was followed by another
rider, a lean, swarthy individual with a smooth-shaven, saturnine
face. Racey knew the latter by sight and reputation. The man was one
Skeel and rejoiced in the nick-name of "Alicran." The furtive scorpion
whose sting is death is not indigenous to the territory, but Mr.
Skeel had gained the appellation in New Mexico, a region where the
tail-bearing insect may be found, and when the man left the Border for
the Border's good the name left with him.

"Oh, lookout! The bushes! The bushes! Don't trample my
thimble-berries!"

But Lanpher, heeding not at all Molly's cries of warning, spurred his
sweating horse through the thimble-berry growth, breaking down three
shrubs, and splashed cat-a-corneredly across the spring, the brook,
and several rows of flowers.

The garden looked as if a miniature cyclone had passed that way.

Midway across the garden Lanpher's horse halted--halted because a
flying figure in chaps had appeared from nowhere and seized it by the