Brice Kenedy owned the sweetest spread of ranchland in all the vast desert country dominated by the Painted Buttes and drained by the clear waters of the Little Puerco. Yet these were troublesome times in that part of Arizona, for Flint Revers was making a hell-hole of his squatters' town of Reverston and gathering about him as tough a gang of bad hombres as the border country had ever seen. Brice's K Bar ranch was losing cattle steadily and recently one of his best cowboys had been bushwhacked. So far, he couldn't prove that the Revers' gang were the rustlers and he hesitated to plunge the range into the open warfare that a showdown would bring.