Drowsiness came and, turning on his side, he reached a hand for the locket to hold it fast while he slept. It was not about his neck. He remembered that he had left it on a rock where he had undressed for his bath and, slipping out of his blankets, turning them back that the night chill might not dampen his bed, he picked his way carefully to the place and groped for the trinket.
His fingers had just touched the gold disc when the quiet of the night was punctured by a shot ... then four more in quick succession.
He squatted low, holding his breath. He heard booted feet running over rocks, heard a man speak gruffly to a horse and, in a moment, heard galloping hoofs carrying a rider away. He waited a half hour, then stole back to his bed. The tarp and blankets were drilled by five bullet holes.
"Maybe I'm superstitious," he muttered, fastening the gold chain about his neck, "but this thing, or whatever is in it, has saved my hide twice in one week."
The man who had fired into his blankets had trailed him deliberately, had waited until satisfied that he was asleep and had stolen up to murder him without offering a fighting chance.
"Hepburn has gone into partnership with Webb," Jane told him on his return to the ranch. "The Reverend brought in that word. What do you make of it?"
"Not much. Without my help it makes about the finest couple of snakes that could be brought together!" Tom muttered.
"And somebody tampered with the ditch in the upper field. Curtis and the men started the water down late in the afternoon. They left their tools there and the ditch bank was broken. They tell me it surely was shoveled out. The water is low and losing it hurt."
"That looks quite like war," he told her.
War it was. That night the men in the bunk house were awakened by a bright glare and looking out Beck saw that four stacks of hay, totaling more than a hundred tons of feed left from the winter, were in a blaze. While the others hastily dressed and ran toward the stack yard in the futile hope that some portion might be saved, the foreman stayed behind ... listening. From far up the road he heard the faint, quick rattle of a running horse.