The Last Protest

Young Moon understood fully. The cow-puncher was mad. Mad cow-punchers with big blue six-shooters in their hands are not objects to fuss lightly with. Young Moon hesitated.

For a moment the two faced each other silently, the Indian and the cow-puncher, the gaudy, picturesque savage and the commonplace utilitarian, the old and the new. Both had much to think of in that moment. Young Moon tried hard to conceive some manner in which he could get a good shot at Collins without danger to himself.

Collins was thinking of the property under his charge, the herd running wildly back and forth in the trail below, and the new home of Peterson the "newcomer," which lay farther down the valley, the first of the houses in the path of Young Moon and his followers. Collins suddenly remembered that there was a young wife in the home of the newcomer; also a little red-cheeked, yellow-haired baby, who had played in the dooryard when he passed there in the morning on his search for the s