THE SAWTOOTH SHOWS ITS HAND In her fictitious West Lorraine had long since come to look upon violence as a synonym for picturesqueness; murder and mystery were inevitably an accompaniment of chaps and spurs.

But when a man she had cooked breakfast for, had talked with just a few hours ago, lay dead in the bunk-house, she forgot that it was merely an expected incident of Western life.

She lay in her bed shaking with nervous dread, and the shrill rasping of the crickets and tree-toads was unendurable.
After the first shock had passed a deep, fighting rage filled her, made her long for day so that she might fight back somehow.

Who was the Sawtooth Company, that they could sweep human beings from their path so ruthlessly and never be called to account?
Not once did she doubt that this was the doing of the Sawtooth, another carefully planned "accident" calculated to rid the country of another man who in some fashion had become inimical to their interests.
From Lone she had learned a good deal about the new irrigation project which lay very close to the Sawtooth's heart.

She could see how the Quirt ranch, with its water rights and its big, fertile meadows and its fences and silent disapprobation of the Sawtooth's methods, might be looked upon as an obstacle which they would be glad to remove.
That her father had been sent down that grade with a brake deliberately made useless was a horrible thought which she could not put from her mind.