Pete Johnson sat cross-legged before the fire.  This mess of venison was no hit-or-miss affair; he was preparing a certain number of venison steaks, giving to each separate steak the consideration of an artist.

Stanley Mitchell kicked the blankets flying.  “Whoo-hoo-oo!  This is the life!” he proclaimed.  Orisons more pious have held less gratitude.

He tugged on one boot, reached for the other—­and then leaped to his feet like a jack-in-the-box.  With the boot in his hand he pointed to the south.  High on the next shadowy range, thirty miles away, a dozen scattered campfires glowed across the dawn.

“What the Billy-hell?” he said, startled.

“Stan-ley!”

“I will say wallop!  I won’t be a lady if I can’t say wallop!” quoth Stan rebelliously.  “What’s doing over at the Gavilan?  There’s never been three men at once in those fiend-forsaken pinnacles before.  Hey!  S’pose they’ve struck it rich, like we did?”

“I’m afraid not,” sighed Pete.  “You toddle along and wash um’s paddies.  She’s most ripe.”

With a green-wood poker he lifted the lid from the bake-oven.  The biscuit were not browned to his taste; he dumped the blackening coals from the lid and slid it into the glowing heart of the fire; he raked out a new bed of coals and lifted the little three-legged bake-oven over them; with his poker he skillfully flirted fresh coals on the rimmed lid and put it back on the oven.  He placed the skillet of venison on a flat rock at his elbow and poured coffee into two battered tin cups.  Breakfast was now ready, and Pete raised his voice in the traditional dinner call of the ranges: 

“Come and get it or I’ll throw it out!”

Stanley came back from a brisk toilet at Ironspring.  He took a preliminary sip of coffee, speared a juicy steak, and eyed his companion darkly.  Mr. Johnson plied knife and fork assiduously, with eyes downcast and demure.

Stanley Mitchell’s smooth young face lined with suspicion.

“When you’ve been up to some deviltry I can always tell it on you—­you look so incredibly meek and meechin’, like a cat eatin’ the canary,” he remarked severely.  “Thank you for a biscuit.  And the sugar!  Now what warlockry is this?” He jerked a thumb at the far-off fires.  “What’s the merry prank?”

Mr. Johnson sighed again.

“Deception.  Treachery.  Mine.”  He looked out across the desert to the Gavilan Hills with a complacent eye.  “And breach of trust.  Mine, again.”

“Who you been betrayin’ now?”

“Just you.  You and your pardner; the last bein’ myself.  You know them location papers of ours I was to get recorded at Tucson?”

Stanley nodded.