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When a man's a man

by Harold Bell Wright · English · Gutenberg #14367 · 511,031 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: When a man's a man

Author: Harold Bell Wright


        
Release date: December 16, 2004 [eBook #14367]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHEN A MAN'S A MAN ***

WHEN A MAN'S
A MAN

BY
HAROLD BELL WRIGHT


GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
By arrangement with D. Appleton-Century Co.

1916




TO MY SONS
GILBERT AND PAUL NORMAN
THIS STORY OF MANHOOD
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY THEIR FATHER




_Acknowledgment_


It is fitting that I should here express my indebtedness to those
Williamson Valley friends who in the kindness of their hearts made this
story possible.

To Mr. George A. Carter, who so generously introduced me to the scenes
described in these pages, and who, on the Pot-Hook-S ranch, gave to my
family one of the most delightful summers we have ever enjoyed; to Mr.
J.H. Stephens and his family, who so cordially welcomed me at rodeo
time; to Mr. and Mrs. Joe Contreras, for their kindly hospitality; to
Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Stewart, who, while this story was first in the
making, made me so much at home in the Cross-Triangle home-ranch; to Mr.
J.W. Cook, my constant companion, helpful guide, patient teacher and
tactful sponsor, who, with his charming wife, made his home mine; to Mr.
and Mrs. Herbert N. Cook, and to the many other cattlemen and cowboys,
with whom, on the range, in the rodeos, in the wild horse chase about
Toohey, after outlaw cattle in Granite Basin, in the corrals and
pastures, I rode and worked and lived, my gratitude is more than I can
put in words. Truer friends or better companions than these
great-hearted, outspoken, hardy riders, no man could have. If my story
in any degree wins the approval of these, my comrades of ranch and
range. I shall be proud and happy. H.B.W.

     "CAMP HOLE-IN-THE-MOUNTAIN"
     NEAR TUCSON, ARIZONA
     APRIL 29, 1916




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                               PAGE
   I. AFTER THE CELEBRATION             11
  II. ON THE DIVIDE                     23
 III. IN THE BIG PASTURE                35
  IV. AT THE CORRAL                     47
   V. A BIT OF THE PAST                 81
  VI. THE DRIFT FENCE                   91
 VII. THINGS THAT ENDURE               115
VIII. CONCERNING BRANDS                133
  IX. THE TAILHOLT MOUNTAIN OUTFIT     159
   X. THE RODEO                        181
  XI. AFTER THE RODEO                  197
 XII. FRONTIER DAY                     239
XIII. IN GRANITE BASIN                 261
 XIV. AT MINT SPRING                   281
  XV. ON CEDAR RIDGE                   297
 XVI. THE SKY LINE                     323

[Illustration: WHEN A MAN'S A MAN]




CHAPTER I.

AFTER THE CELEBRATION.


There is a land where a man, to live, must be a man. It is a land of
granite and marble and porphyry and gold--and a man's strength must be
as the strength of the primeval hills. It is a land of oaks and cedars
and pines--and a man's mental grace must be as the grace of the untamed
trees. It is a land of far-arched and unstained skies, where the wind
sweeps free and untainted, and the atmosphere is the atmosphere of those
places that remain as God made them--and a man's soul must be as the
unstained skies, the unburdened wind, and the untainted atmosphere. It
is a land of wide mesas, of wild, rolling pastures and broad, untilled,
valley meadows--and a man's freedom must be that freedom which is not
bounded by the fences of a too weak and timid conventionalism.

In this land every man is--by divine right--his own king; he is his own
jury, his own counsel, his own judge, and--if it must be--his own
executioner. And in this land where a man, to live, must be a man, a
woman, if she be not a woman, must surely perish.

This is the story of a man who regained that which in his youth had been
lost to him; and of how, even when he had recovered that which had been
taken from him, he still paid the price of his loss. It is the story of
a woman who was saved from herself; and of how she was led to hold fast
to those things, the loss of which cost the man so great a price.

The story, as I have put it down here, begins at Prescott, Arizona, on
the day following the annual Fourth-of-July celebration in one of those
far-western years that saw the passing of the Indian and the coming of
the automobile.

The man was walking along one of the few roads that lead out from the
little city, through the mountain gaps and passes, to the wide, unfenced
ranges, and to the lonely scattered ranches on the creeks and flats and
valleys of the great open country that lies beyond.

From the fact that he was walking in that land where the distances are
such that men most commonly ride, and from the many marks that
environment and training leave upon us all, it was evident that the
pedestrian was a stranger. He was a man in the prime of young
manhood--tall and exceedingly well proportioned--and as he went forward
along the dusty road he bore himself with the unconscious air of one
more accustomed to crowded streets than to that rude and unpaved
highway. His clothing bore the unmistakable stamp of a tailor of rank.
His person was groomed with that nicety of detail that is permitted only
to those who possess both means and leisure, as well as taste. It was
evident, too, from his movement and bearing, that he had not sought the
mile-high atmosphere of Prescott with the hope that it holds out to
those in need of health. But, still, there was a something about him
that suggested a lack of the manly vigor and strength that should have
been his.

A student of men would have said that Nature made this man to be in
physical strength and spiritual prowess, a comrade and leader of men--a
man's man--a man among men. The same student, looking more closely,
might have added that in some way--through some cruel trick of
fortune--this man had been cheated of his birthright.

The day was still young when the stranger gained the top of the first
hill where the road turns to make its steep and winding way down through
scattered pines and scrub oak to the Burnt Ranch.

Behind him the little city--so picturesque in its mountain basin, with
the wild, unfenced land coming down to its very dooryards--was slowly
awakening after the last mad night of its celebration. The tents of the
tawdry shows that had tempted the crowds with vulgar indecencies, and
the booths that had sheltered the petty games of chance where
loud-voiced criers had persuaded the multitude with the hope of winning
a worthless bauble or a tinsel toy, were being cleared away from the
borders of the plaza, the beauty of which their presence had marred. In
the plaza itself--which is the heart of the town, and is usually kept
with much pride and care--the bronze statue of the vigorous Rough Rider
Bucky O'Neil and his spirited charger seemed pathetically out of place
among the litter of colored confetti and exploded fireworks, and the
refuse from various "treats" and lunches left by the celebrating
citizens and their guests. The flags and bunting that from window and
roof and pole and doorway had given the day its gay note of color hung
faded and listless, as though, spent with their gaiety, and mutely
conscious that the spirit and purpose of their gladness was past, they
waited the hand that would remove them to the ash barrel and the rubbish
heap.

Pausing, the man turned to look back.

For some minutes he stood as one who, while determined upon a certain
course, yet hesitates--reluctant and regretful--at the beginning of his
venture. Then he went on; walking with a certain reckless swing, as
though, in ignorance of that land toward which he had set his face, he
still resolutely turned his back upon that which lay behind. It was as
though, for this man, too, the gala day, with its tinseled bravery and
its confetti spirit, was of the past.

A short way down the hill the man stopped again. This time to stand half
turned, with his head in a listening attitude. The sound of a vehicle
approaching from the way whence he had come had reached his ear.

As the noise of wheels and hoofs grew louder a strange expression of
mingled uncertainty, determination, and something very like fear came
over his face. He started forward, hesitated, looked back, then turned
doubtfully toward the thinly wooded mountain side. Then, with tardy
decision he left the road and disappeared behind a clump of oak bushes,
an instant before a team and buckboard rounded the turn and appeared in
full view.

An unmistakable cattleman--grizzly-haired, square-shouldered and
substantial--was driving the wild looking team. Beside him sat a
motherly woman and a little boy.

As they passed the clump of bushes the near horse of the half-broken
pair gave a catlike bound to the right against his tracemate. A second
jump followed the first with flash-like quickness; and this time the
frightened animal was accompanied by his companion, who, not knowing
what it was all about, jumped on general principles. But, quick as they
were, the strength of the driver's skillful arms met their weight on the
reins and forced them to keep the road.

"You blamed fools"--the driver chided good-naturedly, as they plunged
ahead--"been raised on a cow ranch to get scared at a calf in the
brush!"

Very slowly the stranger came from behind the bushes. Cautiously he
returned to the road. His fine lips curled in a curious mocking smile.
But it was himself that he mocked, for there was a look in his dark eyes
that gave to his naturally strong face an almost pathetic expression of
self-depreciation and shame.

As the pedestrian crossed the creek at the Burnt Ranch, Joe Conley,
leading a horse by a riata which was looped as it had fallen about the
animal's neck, came through the big corral gate across the road from
the house. At the barn Joe disappeared through the small door of the
saddle room, the coil of the riata still in his hand, thus compelling
his mount to await his return.

At sight of the cowboy the stranger again paused and stood hesitating in
indecision. But as Joe reappeared from the barn with bridle, saddle
blanket and saddle in hand, the man went reluctantly forward as though
prompted by some necessity.

"Good morning!" said the stranger, courteously, and his voice was the
voice that fitted his dress and bearing, while his face was now the
carefully schooled countenance of a man world-trained and well-poised.

With a quick estimating glance Joe returned the stranger's greeting and,
dropping the saddle and blanket on the ground, approached his horse's
head. Instantly the animal sprang back, with head high and eyes defiant;
but there was no escape, for the rawhide riata was still securely held
by his master. There was a short, sharp scuffle that sent the gravel by
the roadside flying--the controlling bit was between the reluctant
teeth--and the cowboy, who had silently taken the horse's objection as a
matter of course, adjusted the blanket, and with the easy skill of long
practice swung the heavy saddle to its place.

As the cowboy caught the dangling cinch, and with a deft hand tucked the
latigo strap through the ring and drew it tight, there was a look of
almost pathetic wistfulness on the watching stranger's face--a look of
wistfulness and admiration and envy.

Dropping the stirrup, Joe again faced the stranger, this time
inquiringly, with that bold, straightforward look so characteristic of
his kind.

And now, when the man spoke, his voice had a curious note, as if the
speaker had lost a little of his poise. It was almost a note of apology,
and again in his eyes there was that pitiful look of self-depreciation
and shame.

"Pardon me," he said, "but will you tell me, please, am I right that
this is the road to the Williamson Valley?"

The stranger's manner and voice were in such contrast to his general
appearance that the cowboy frankly looked his wonder as he answered
courteously, "Yes, sir."

"And it will take me direct to the Cross-Triangle Ranch?"

"If you keep straight ahead across the valley, it will. If you take the
right-hand fork on the ridge above the goat ranch, it will take you to
Simmons. There's a road from Simmons to the Cross-Triangle on the far
side of the valley, though. You can see the valley and the
Cross-Triangle home ranch from the top of the Divide."

"Thank you."

The stranger was turning to go when the man in the blue jumper and
fringed leather chaps spoke again, curiously.

"The Dean with Stella and Little Billy passed in the buckboard less than
an hour ago, on their way home from the celebration. Funny they didn't
pick you up, if you're goin' there!"

The other paused questioningly. "The Dean?"

The cowboy smiled. "Mr. Baldwin, the owner of the Cross-Triangle, you
know."

"Oh!" The stranger was clearly embarrassed. Perhaps he was thinking of
that clump of bushes on the mountain side.

Joe, loosing his riata from the horse's neck, and coiling it carefully,
considered a moment. Then: "You ain't goin' to walk to the
Cross-Triangle, be you?"

That self-mocking smile touched the man's lips; but there was a hint of
decisive purpose in his voice as he answered, "Oh, yes."

Again the cowboy frankly measured the stranger. Then he moved toward the
corral gate, the coiled riata in one hand, the bridle rein in the other.
"I'll catch up a horse for you," he said in a matter-of-fact tone, as if
reaching a decision.

The other spoke hastily. "No, no, please don't trouble."

Joe paused curiously. "Any friend of Mr. Baldwin's is welcome to
anything on the Burnt Ranch, Stranger."

"But I--ah--I--have never met Mr. Baldwin," explained the other lamely.

"Oh, that's all right," returned the cowboy heartily. "You're a-goin'
to, an' that's the same thing." Again he started toward the gate.

"But I--pardon me--you are very kind--but I--I prefer to walk."

Once more Joe halted, a puzzled expression on his tanned and
weather-beaten face. "I suppose you know it's some walk," he suggested
doubtfully, as if the man's ignorance were the only possible solution of
his unheard-of assertion.

"So I understand. But it will be good for me. Really, I prefer to walk."

Without a word the cowboy turned back to his horse, and proceeded
methodically to tie the coiled riata in its place on the saddle. Then,
without a glance toward the stranger who stood watching him in
embarrassed silence, he threw the bridle reins over his horse's head,
gripped the saddle horn and swung to his seat, reining his horse away
from the man beside the road.

The stranger, thus abruptly dismissed, moved hurriedly away.

Half way to the creek the cowboy checked his horse and looked back at
the pedestrian as the latter was making his way under the pines and up
the hill. When the man had disappeared over the crest of the hill, the
cowboy muttered a bewildered something, and, touching his horse with the
spurs, loped away, as if dismissing a problem too complex for his simple
mind.

All that day the stranger followed the dusty, unfenced road. Over his
head the wide, bright sky was without a cloud to break its vast expanse.
On the great, open range of mountain, flat and valley the cattle lay
quietly in the shade of oak or walnut or cedar, or, with slow, listless
movement, sought the watering places to slake their thirst. The wild
things retreated to their secret hiding places in rocky den and leafy
thicket to await the cool of the evening hunting hour. The very air was
motionless, as if the never-tired wind itself drowsed indolently.

And alone in the hushed bigness of that land the man walked with his
thoughts--brooding, perhaps, over whatever it was that had so strangely
placed him there--dreaming, it may be, over that which might have been,
or that which yet might be--viewing with questioning, wondering,
half-fearful eyes the mighty, untamed scenes that met his eye on every
hand. Nor did anyone see him, for at every sound of approaching horse or
vehicle he went aside from the highway to hide in the bushes or behind
convenient rocks. And always when he came from his hiding place to
resume his journey that odd smile of self-mockery was on his face.

At noon he rested for a little beside the road while he ate a meager
sandwich that he took from the pocket of his coat. Then he pushed on
again, with grim determination, deeper and deeper into the heart and
life of that world which was, to him, so evidently new and strange. The
afternoon was well spent when he made his way--wearily now, with
drooping shoulders and dragging step--up the long slope of the Divide
that marks the eastern boundary of the range about Williamson Valley.

At the summit, where the road turns sharply around a shoulder of the
mountain and begins the steep descent on the other side of the ridge, he
stopped. His tired form straightened. His face lighted with a look of
wondering awe, and an involuntary exclamation came from his lips as his
unaccustomed eyes swept the wide view that lay from his feet unrolled
before him.

Under that sky, so unmatched in its clearness and depth of color, the
land lay in all its variety of valley and forest and mesa and
mountain--a scene unrivaled in the magnificence and grandeur of its
beauty. Miles upon miles in the distance, across those primeval reaches,
the faint blue peaks and domes and ridges of the mountains ranked--an
uncounted sentinel host. The darker masses of the timbered hillsides,
with the varying shades of pine and cedar, the lighter tints of oak
brush and chaparral, the dun tones of the open grass lands, and the
brighter note of the valley meadows' green were defined, blended and
harmonized by the overlying haze with a delicacy exquisite beyond all
human power to picture. And in the nearer distances, chief of that army
of mountain peaks, and master of the many miles that lie within their
circle, Granite Mountain, gray and grim, reared its mighty bulk of cliff
and crag as if in supreme defiance of the changing years or the hand of
humankind.

In the heart of that beautiful land upon which, from the summit of the
Divide, the stranger looked with such rapt appreciation, lies Williamson
Valley, a natural meadow of lush, dark green, native grass. And, had the
man's eyes been trained to such distances, he might have distinguished
in the blue haze the red roofs of the buildings of the Cross-Triangle
Ranch.

For some time the man stood there, a lonely figure against the sky,
peculiarly out of place in his careful garb of the cities. The schooled
indifference of his face was broken. His self-depreciation and mockery
were forgotten. His dark eyes glowed with the fire of excited
anticipation--with hope and determined purpose. Then, with a quick
movement, as though some ghost of the past had touched him on the
shoulder, he looked back on the way he had come. And the light in his
eyes went out in the gloom of painful memories. His countenance,
unguarded because of his day of loneliness, grew dark with sadness and
shame. It was as though he looked beyond the town he had left that
morning, with its litter and refuse of yesterday's pleasure, to a life
and a world of tawdry shams, wherein men give themselves to win by means
fair or foul the tinsel baubles that are offered in the world's petty
games of chance.

And yet, even as he looked back, there was in the man's face as much of
longing as of regret. He seemed as one who, realizing that he had
reached a point in his life journey--a divide, as it were--from which he
could see two ways, was resolved to turn from the path he longed to
follow and to take the road that appealed to him the least. As one
enlisting to fight in a just and worthy cause might pause a moment,
before taking the oath of service, to regret the ease and freedom he was
about to surrender, so this man paused on the summit of the Divide.

Slowly, at last, in weariness of body and spirit, he stumbled a few feet
aside from the road, and, sinking down upon a convenient rock, gave
himself again to the contemplation of that scene which lay before him.
And there was that in his movement now that seemed to tell of one who,
in the grip of some bitter and disappointing experience, was yet being
forced by something deep in his being to reach out in the strength of
his manhood to take that which he had been denied.

Again the man's untrained eyes had failed to note that which would have
first attracted the attention of one schooled in the land that lay about
him. He had not seen a tiny moving speck on the road over which he had
passed. A horseman was riding toward him.




CHAPTER II.

ON THE DIVIDE.


Had the man on the Divide noticed the approaching horseman it would have
been evident, even to one so unacquainted with the country as the
stranger, that the rider belonged to that land of riders. While still at
a distance too great for the eye to distinguish the details of fringed
leather chaps, soft shirt, short jumper, sombrero, spurs and riata, no
one could have mistaken the ease and grace of the cowboy who seemed so
literally a part of his horse. His seat in the saddle was so secure, so
easy, and his bearing so unaffected and natural, that every movement of
the powerful animal he rode expressed itself rhythmically in his own
lithe and sinewy body.

While the stranger sat wrapped in meditative thought, unheeding the
approach of the rider, the horseman, coming on with a long, swinging
lope, watched the motionless figure on the summit of the Divide with
careful interest. As he drew nearer the cowboy pulled his horse down to
a walk, and from under his broad hat brim regarded the stranger
intently. He was within a few yards of the point where the man sat when
the latter caught the sound of the horse's feet, and, with a quick,
startled look over his shoulder, sprang up and started as if to escape.
But it was too late, and, as though on second thought, he whirled about
with a half defiant air to face the intruder.

The horseman stopped. He had not missed the significance of that hurried
movement, and his right hand rested carelessly on his leather clad
thigh, while his grey eyes were fixed boldly, inquiringly, almost
challengingly, on the man he had so unintentionally surprised.

As he sat there on his horse, so alert, so ready, in his cowboy garb and
trappings, against the background of Granite Mountain, with all its
rugged, primeval strength, the rider made a striking picture of virile
manhood. Of some years less than thirty, he was, perhaps, neither as
tall nor as heavy as the stranger; but in spite of a certain boyish look
on his smooth-shaven, deeply-bronzed face, he bore himself with the
unmistakable air of a matured and self-reliant man. Every nerve and
fiber of him seemed alive with that vital energy which is the true
beauty and the glory of life.

The two men presented a striking contrast. Without question one was the
proud and finished product of our most advanced civilization. It was as
evident that the splendid manhood of the other had never been dwarfed by
the weakening atmosphere of an over-cultured, too conventional and too
complex environment. The stranger with his carefully tailored clothing
and his man-of-the-world face and bearing was as unlike this rider of
the unfenced lands as a daintily groomed thoroughbred from the
sheltered and guarded stables of fashion is unlike a wild, untamed
stallion from the hills and ranges about Granite Mountain. Yet, unlike
as they were, there was a something that marked them as kin. The man of
the ranges and the man of the cities were, deep beneath the surface of
their beings, as like as the spirited thoroughbred and the unbroken wild
horse. The cowboy was all that the stranger might have been. The
stranger was all that the cowboy, under like conditions, would have
been.

As they silently faced each other it seemed for a moment that each
instinctively recognized this kinship. Then into the dark eyes of the
stranger--as when he had watched the cowboy at the Burnt Ranch--there
came that look of wistful admiration and envy.

And at this, as if the man had somehow made himself known, the horseman
relaxed his attitude of tense readiness. The hand that had held the
bridle rein to command instant action of his horse, and the hand that
had rested so near the rider's hip, came together on the saddle horn in
careless ease, while a boyish smile of amusement broke over the young
man's face.

That smile brought a flash of resentment into the eyes of the other and
a flush of red darkened his untanned cheeks. A moment he stood; then
with an air of haughty rebuke he deliberately turned his back, and,
seating himself again, looked away over the landscape.

But the smiling cowboy did not move. For a moment as he regarded the
stranger his shoulders shook with silent, contemptuous laughter; then
his face became grave, and he looked a little ashamed. The minutes
passed, and still he sat there, quietly waiting.

Presently, as if yielding to the persistent, silent presence of the
horseman, and submitting reluctantly to the intrusion, the other turned,
and again the two who were so like and yet so unlike faced each other.

It was the stranger now who smiled. But it was a smile that caused the
cowboy to become on the instant kindly considerate. Perhaps he
remembered one of the Dean's favorite sayings: "Keep your eye on the man
who laughs when he's hurt."

"Good evening!" said the stranger doubtfully, but with a hint of
conscious superiority in his manner.

"Howdy!" returned the cowboy heartily, and in his deep voice was the
kindliness that made him so loved by all who knew him. "Been having some
trouble?"

"If I have, it is my own, sir," retorted the other coldly.

"Sure," returned the horseman gently, "and you're welcome to it. Every
man has all he needs of his own, I reckon. But I didn't mean it that
way; I meant your horse."

The stranger looked at him questioningly. "Beg pardon?" he said.

"What?"

"I do not understand."

"Your horse--where is your horse?"

"Oh, yes! Certainly--of course--my horse--how stupid of me!" The tone of
the man's answer was one of half apology, and he was smiling whimsically
now as if at his own predicament, as he continued. "I have no horse.
Really, you know, I wouldn't know what to do with one if I had it."

"You don't mean to say that you drifted all the way out here from
Prescott on foot!" exclaimed the astonished cowboy.

The man on the ground looked up at the horseman, and in a droll tone
that made the rider his friend, said, while he stretched his long legs
painfully: "I like to walk. You see I--ah--fancied it would be good for
me, don't you know."

The cowboy laughingly considered--trying, as he said afterward, to
figure it out. It was clear that this tall stranger was not in search of
health, nor did he show any of the distinguishing marks of the tourist.
He certainly appeared to be a man of means. He could not be looking for
work. He did not seem a suspicious character--quite the contrary--and
yet--there was that significant hurried movement as if to escape when
the horseman had surprised him. The etiquette of the country forbade a
direct question, but--

"Yes," he agreed thoughtfully, "walking comes in handy sometimes. I
don't take to it much myself, though." Then he added shrewdly, "You were
at the celebration, I reckon."

The stranger's voice betrayed quick enthusiasm, but that odd wistfulness
crept into his eyes again and he seemed to lose a little of his poise.

"Indeed I was," he said. "I never saw anything to compare with it. I've
seen all kinds of athletic sports and contests and exhibitions, with
circus performances and riding, and that sort of thing, you know, and
I've read about such things, of course, but"--and his voice grew
thoughtful--"that men ever actually did them--and all in the day's
work, as you may say--I--I never dreamed that there _were_ men like that
in these days."

The cowboy shifted his weight uneasily in the saddle, while he regarded
the man on the ground curiously. "She was sure a humdinger of a
celebration," he admitted, "but as for the show part I've seen things
happen when nobody was thinking anything about it that would make those
stunts at Prescott look funny. The horse racing was pretty good,
though," he finished, with suggestive emphasis.

The other did not miss the point of the suggestion. "I didn't bet on
anything," he laughed.

"It's funny nobody picked you up on the road out here," the cowboy next
offered pointedly. "The folks started home early this morning--and Jim
Reid and his family passed me about an hour ago--they were in an
automobile. The Simmons stage must have caught up with you somewhere."

The stranger's face flushed, and he seemed trying to find some answer.

The cowboy watched him curiously; then in a musing tone added the
suggestion, "Some lonesome up here on foot."

"But there are times, you know," returned the other desperately, "when a
man prefers to be alone."

The cowboy straightened in his saddle and lifted his reins. "Thanks," he
said dryly, "I reckon I'd better be moving."

But the other spoke quickly. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Acton, I did not
mean that for you."

The horseman dropped his hands again to the saddle horn, and resumed his
lounging posture, thus tacitly accepting the apology. "You have the
advantage of me," he said.

The stranger laughed. "Everyone knows that 'Wild Horse Phil' of the
Cross-Triangle Ranch won the bronco-riding championship yesterday. I saw
you ride."

Philip Acton's face showed boyish embarrassment.

The other continued, with his strange enthusiasm. "It was great
work--wonderful! I never saw anything like it."

There was no mistaking the genuineness of his admiration, nor could he
hide that wistful look in his eyes.

"Shucks!" said the cowboy uneasily. "I could pick a dozen of the boys in
that outfit who can ride all around me. It was just my luck, that's
all--I happened to draw an easy one."

"Easy!" ejaculated the stranger, seeing again in his mind the fighting,
plunging, maddened, outlawed brute that this boy-faced man had mastered.
"And I suppose catching and throwing those steers was easy, too?"

The cowboy was plainly wondering at the man's peculiar enthusiasm for
these most commonplace things. "The roping? Why, that was no more than
we're doing all the time."

"I don't mean the roping," returned the other, "I mean when you rode up
beside one of those steers that was running at full speed, and caught
him by the horns with your bare hands, and jumped from your saddle, and
threw the beast over you, and then lay there with his horns pinning you
down! You aren't doing that all the time, are you? You don't mean to
tell me that such things as that are a part of your everyday work!"

"Oh, the bull doggin'! Why, no," admitted Phil, with an embarrassed
laugh, "that was just fun, you know."

The stranger stared at him, speechless. Fun! In the name of all that is
most modern in civilization, what manner of men were these who did such
things in fun! If this was their recreation, what must their work be!

"Do you mind my asking," he said wistfully, "how you learned to do such
things?"

"Why, I don't know--we just do them, I reckon."

"And could anyone learn to ride as you ride, do you think?" The question
came with marked eagerness.

"I don't see why not," answered the cowboy honestly.

The stranger shook his head doubtfully and looked away over the wild
land where the shadows of the late afternoon were lengthening.

"Where are you going to stop to-night?" Phil Acton asked suddenly.

The stranger did not take his eyes from the view that seemed to hold for
him such peculiar interest. "Really," he answered indifferently, "I had
not thought of that."

"I should think you'd be thinking of it along about supper time, if
you've walked from town since morning."

The stranger looked up with sudden interest; but the cowboy fancied that
there was a touch of bitterness under the droll tone of his reply. "Do
you know, Mr. Acton, I have never been really hungry in my life. It
might be interesting to try it once, don't you think?"

Phil Acton laughed, as he returned, "It might be interesting, all right,
but I think I better tell you, just the same, that there's a ranch down
yonder in the timber. It's nothing but a goat ranch, but I reckon they
would take you in. It's too far to the Cross-Triangle for me to ask you
there. You can see the buildings, though, from here."

The stranger sprang up in quick interest. "You can? The Cross-Triangle
Ranch?"

"Sure," the cowboy smiled and pointed into the distance. "Those red
spots over there are the roofs. Jim Reid's place--the Pot-Hook-S--is
just this side of the meadows, and a little to the south. The old Acton
homestead--where I was born--is in that bunch of cottonwoods, across the
wash from the Cross-Triangle."

But strive as he might the stranger's eyes could discern no sign of
human habitation in those vast reaches that lay before him.

"If you are ever over that way, drop in," said Phil cordially. "Mr.
Baldwin will be glad to meet you."

"Do you really mean that?" questioned the other doubtfully.

"We don't say such things in this country if we don't mean them,
Stranger," was the cool retort.

"Of course, I beg your pardon, Mr. Acton," came the confused reply. "I
should like to see the ranch. I may--I will--That is, if I--" He stopped
as if not knowing how to finish, and with a gesture of hopelessness
turned away to stand silently looking back toward the town, while his
face was dark with painful memories, and his lips curved in that
mirthless, self-mocking smile.

And Philip Acton, seeing, felt suddenly that he had rudely intruded upon
the privacy of one who had sought the solitude of that lonely place to
hide the hurt of some bitter experience. A certain native gentleness
made the man of the ranges understand that this stranger was face to
face with some crisis in his life--that he was passing through one of
those trials through which a man must pass alone. Had it been possible
the cowboy would have apologized. But that would have been an added
unkindness. Lifting the reins and sitting erect in the saddle, he said
indifferently, "Well, I must be moving. I take a short cut here. So
long! Better make it on down to the goat ranch--it's not far."

He touched his horse with the spur and the animal sprang away.

"Good-bye!" called the stranger, and that wistful look was in his eyes
as the rider swung his horse aside from the road, plunged down the
mountain side, and dashed away through the brush and over the rocks with
reckless speed. With a low exclamation of wondering admiration, the man
climbed hastily to a higher point, and from there watched until horse
and rider, taking a steeper declivity without checking their breakneck
course, dropped from sight in a cloud of dust. The faint sound of the
sliding rocks and gravel dislodged by the flying feet died away; the
cloud of dust dissolved in the thin air. The stranger looked away into
the blue distance in another vain attempt to see the red spots that
marked the Cross-Triangle Ranch.

Slowly the man returned to his seat on the rock. The long shadows of
Granite Mountain crept out from the base of the cliffs farther and
farther over the country below. The blue of the distant hills changed to
mauve with deeper masses of purple in the shadows where the canyons are.
The lonely figure on the summit of the Divide did not move.

The sun hid itself behind the line of mountains, and the blue of the sky
in the west changed slowly to gold against which the peaks and domes and
points were silhouetted as if cut by a graver's tool, and the bold
cliffs and battlements of old Granite grew coldly gray in the gloom. As
the night came on and the details of its structure were lost, the
mountain, to the watching man on the Divide, assumed the appearance of a
mighty fortress--a fortress, he thought, to which a generation of men
might retreat from a civilization that threatened them with destruction;
and once more the man faced back the way he had come.

The far-away cities were already in the blaze of their own artificial
lights--lights valued not for their power to make men see, but for their
power to dazzle, attract and intoxicate--lights that permitted no kindly
dusk at eventide wherein a man might rest from his day's work--a quiet
hour; lights that revealed squalid shame and tinsel show--lights that
hid the stars. The man on the Divide lifted his face to the stars that
now in the wide-arched sky were gathering in such unnumbered multitudes
to keep their sentinel watch over the world below.

The cool evening wind came whispering over the lonely land, and all the
furred and winged creatures of the night stole from their dark hiding
places into the gloom which is the beginning of their day. A coyote
crept stealthily past in the dark and from the mountain side below came
the weird, ghostly call of its mate. An owl drifted by on silent wings.
Night birds chirped in the chaparral. A fox barked on the ridge above.
The shadowy form of a bat flitted here and there. From somewhere in the
distance a bull bellowed his deep-voiced challenge.

Suddenly the man on the summit of the Divide sprang to his feet and,
with a gesture that had he not been so alone might have seemed
affectedly dramatic, stretched out his arms in an attitude of wistful
longing while his lips moved as if, again and again, he whispered a
name.




CHAPTER III.

IN THE BIG PASTURE.


In the Williamson Valley country the spring round-up, or "rodeo," as it
is called in Arizona, and the shipping are well over by the last of
June. During the long summer weeks, until the beginning of the fall
rodeo in September, there is little for the riders to do. The cattle
roam free on the open ranges, while calves grow into yearlings,
yearlings become two-year-olds, and two-year-olds mature for the market.
On the Cross-Triangle and similar ranches, three or four of the steadier
year-round hands only are held. These repair and build fences, visit the
watering places, brand an occasional calf that somehow has managed to
escape the dragnet of the rodeo, and with "dope bottle" ever at hand
doctor such animals as are afflicted with screwworms. It is during these
weeks, too, that the horses are broken; for, with the hard and dangerous
work of the fall and spring months, there is always need for fresh
mounts.

The horses of the Cross-Triangle were never permitted to run on the open
range. Because the leaders of the numerous bands of wild horses that
roamed over the country about Granite Mountain were always ambitious to
gain recruits for their harems from their civilized neighbors, the
freedom of the ranch horses was limited by the fences of a
four-thousand-acre pasture. But within these miles of barbed wire
boundaries the brood mares with their growing progeny lived as free and
untamed as their wild cousins on the unfenced lands about them. The
colts, except for one painful experience, when they were roped and
branded, from the day of their birth until they were ready to be broken
were never handled.

On the morning following his meeting with the stranger on the Divide
Phil Acton, with two of his cowboy helpers, rode out to the big pasture
to bring in the band.

The owner of the Cross-Triangle always declared that Phil was intimately
acquainted with every individual horse and head of stock between the
Divide and Camp Wood Mountain, and from Skull Valley to the Big Chino.
In moments of enthusiasm the Dean even maintained stoutly that his young
foreman knew as well every coyote, fox, badger, deer, antelope, mountain
lion, bobcat and wild horse that had home or hunting ground in the
country over which the lad had ridden since his babyhood. Certain it is
that "Wild Horse Phil," as he was called by admiring friends--for
reasons which you shall hear--loved this work and life to which he was
born. Every feature of that wild land, from lonely mountain peak to
hidden canyon spring, was as familiar to him as the streets and
buildings of a man's home city are well known to the one reared among
them. And as he rode that morning with his comrades to the day's work
the young man felt keenly the call of the primitive, unspoiled life that
throbbed with such vital strength about him. He could not have put that
which he felt into words; he was not even conscious of the forces that
so moved him; he only knew that he was glad.

The days of the celebration at Prescott had been enjoyable days. To meet
old friends and comrades; to ride with them in the contests that all
true men of his kind love; to compare experiences and exchange news and
gossip with widely separated neighbors--had been a pleasure. But the
curious crowds of strangers; the throngs of sightseers from the, to him,
unknown world of cities, who had regarded him as they might have viewed
some rare and little-known creature in a menagerie, and the brazen
presence of those unclean parasites and harpies that prey always upon
such occasions had oppressed and disgusted him until he was glad to
escape again to the clean freedom, the pure vitality and the unspoiled
spirit of his everyday life and environment. In an overflow of sheer
physical and spiritual energy he lifted his horse into a run and with a
shrill cowboy yell challenged his companions to a wild race to the
pasture gate.

It was some time after noon when Phil checked his horse near the ruins
of an old Indian lookout on the top of Black Hill. Below, in the open
land above Deep Wash, he could see his cowboy companions working the
band of horses that had been gathered slowly toward the narrow pass that
at the eastern end of Black Hill leads through to the flats at the upper
end of the big meadows, and so to the gate and to the way they would
follow to the corral. It was Phil's purpose to ride across Black Hill
down the western and northern slope, through the cedar timber, and,
picking up any horses that might be ranging there, join the others at
the gate. In the meanwhile there was time for a few minutes rest.
Dismounting, he loosed the girths and lifted saddle and blanket from
Hobson's steaming back. Then, while the good horse, wearied with the
hard riding and the steep climb up the mountain side, stood quietly in
the shade of a cedar his master, stretched on the ground near by, idly
scanned the world that lay below and about them.

Very clearly in that light atmosphere Phil could see the trees and
buildings of the home ranch, and, just across the sandy wash from the
Cross-Triangle, the grove of cottonwoods and walnuts that hid the little
old house where he was born. A mile away, on the eastern side of the
great valley meadows, he could see the home buildings of the Reid
ranch--the Pot-Hook-S--where Kitty Reid had lived all the days of her
life except those three years which she had spent at school in the East.

The young man on the top of Black Hill looked long at the Reid home. In
his mind he could see Kitty dressed in some cool, simple gown, fresh and
dainty after the morning's housework, sitting with book or sewing on the
front porch. The porch was on the other side of the house, it is true,
and the distance was too great for him to distinguish a person in any
case, but all that made no difference to Phil's vision--he could see her
just the same.

Kitty had been very kind to Phil at the celebration. But Kitty was
always kind--nearly always. But in spite of her kindness the cowboy felt
that she had not, somehow, seemed to place a very high valuation upon
the medal he had won in the bronco-riding contest. Phil himself did not
greatly value the medal; but he had wanted greatly to win that
championship because of the very substantial money prize that went with
it. That money, in Phil's mind, was to play a very important part in a
long cherished dream that was one of the things that Phil Acton did not
talk about. He had not, in fact, ridden for the championship at all, but
for his dream, and that was why it mattered so much when Kitty seemed so
to lack interest in his success.

As though his subconscious mind directed the movement, the young man
looked away from Kitty's home to the distant mountain ridge where the
night before on the summit of the Divide he had met the stranger. All
the way home the cowboy had wondered about the man; evolving many
theories, inventing many things to account for his presence, alone and
on foot, so far from the surroundings to which he was so clearly
accustomed. Of one thing Phil was sure--the man was in trouble--deep
trouble. The more that the clean-minded, gentle-hearted lad of the great
out-of-doors thought about it, the more strongly he felt that he had
unwittingly intruded at a moment that was sacred to the stranger--sacred
because the man was fighting one of those battles that every man must
fight--and fight alone. It was this feeling that had kept the young man
from speaking of the incident to anyone--even to the Dean, or to
"Mother," as he called Mrs. Baldwin. Perhaps, too, this feeling was the
real reason for Phil's sense of kinship with the stranger, for the
cowboy himself had moments in his life that he could permit no man to
look upon. But in his thinking of the man whose personality had so
impressed him one thing stood out above all the rest--the stranger
clearly belonged to that world of which, from experience, the young
foreman of the Cross-Triangle knew nothing. Phil Acton had no desire for
the world to which the stranger belonged, but in his heart there was a
troublesome question. If--if he himself were more like the man whom he
had met on the Divide; if--if he knew more of that other world; if he,
in some degree, belonged to that other world, as Kitty, because of her
three years in school belonged, would it make any difference?

From the distant mountain ridge that marks the eastern limits of the
Williamson Valley country, and thus, in a degree, marked the limit of
Phil's world, the lad's gaze turned again to the scene immediately
before him.

The band of horses, followed by the cowboys, were trotting from the
narrow pass out into the open flats. Some of the band--the mothers--went
quietly, knowing from past experience that they would in a few hours be
returned to their freedom. Others--the colts and yearlings--bewildered,
curious and fearful, followed their mothers without protest. But those
who in many a friendly race or primitive battle had proved their growing
years seemed to sense a coming crisis in their lives, hitherto peaceful.
And these, as though warned by that strange instinct which guards all
wild things, and realizing that the open ground between the pass and the
gate presented their last opportunity, made final desperate efforts to
escape. With sudden dashes, dodging and doubling, they tried again and
again for freedom. But always between them and the haunts they loved
there was a persistent horseman. Running, leaping, whirling, in their
efforts to be everywhere at once, the riders worked their charges toward
the gate.

The man on the hilltop sprang to his feet. Hobson threw up his head, and
with sharp ears forward eagerly watched the game he knew so well. With a
quickness incredible to the uninitiated, Phil threw blanket and saddle
to place. As he drew the cinch tight, a shrill cowboy yell came up from
the flat below.

One of the band, a powerful bay, had broken past the guarding horsemen,
and was running with every ounce of his strength for the timber on the
western slope of Black Hill. For a hundred yards one of the riders had
tried to overtake and turn the fugitive; but as he saw how the stride of
the free horse was widening the distance between them, the cowboy turned
back lest others follow the successful runaway's example. The yell was
to inform Phil of the situation.

Before the echoes of the signal could die away Phil was in the saddle,
and with an answering shout sent Hobson down the rough mountain side in
a wild, reckless, plunging run to head the, for the moment, victorious
bay. An hour later the foreman rejoined his companions who were holding
the band of horses at the gate. The big bay, reluctant, protesting,
twisting and turning in vain attempts to outmaneuver Hobson, was a
captive in the loop of "Wild Horse Phil's" riata.

In the big corral that afternoon Phil and his helpers with the Dean and
Little Billy looking on, cut out from the herd the horses selected to be
broken. These, one by one, were forced through the gate into the
adjoining corral, from which they watched with uneasy wonder and many
excited and ineffectual attempts to follow, when their more fortunate
companions were driven again to the big pasture. Then Phil opened
another gate, and the little band dashed wildly through, to find
themselves in the small meadow pasture where they would pass the last
night before the one great battle of their lives--a battle that would be
for them a dividing point between those years of ease and freedom which
had been theirs from birth and the years of hard and useful service that
were to come.

Phil sat on his horse at the gate watching with critical eye as the
unbroken animals raced away. "Some good ones in the bunch this year,
Uncle Will," he commented to his employer, who, standing on the watering
trough in the other corral, was looking over the fence.

"There's bound to be some good ones in every bunch," returned Mr.
Baldwin. "And some no account ones, too," he added, as his foreman
dismounted beside him.

Then, while the young man slipped the bridle from his horse and stood
waiting for the animal to drink, the older man regarded him silently, as
though in his own mind the Dean's observation bore somewhat upon Phil
himself. That was always the way with the Dean. As Sheriff Fellows once
remarked to Judge Powell in the old days of the cattle rustlers' glory,
"Whatever Bill Baldwin says is mighty nigh always double-barreled."

There are also two sides to the Dean. Or, rather, to be accurate, there
is a front and a back. The back--flat and straight and broad--indicates
one side of his character--the side that belongs with the square chin
and the blue eyes that always look at you with such frank directness. It
was this side of the man that brought him barefooted and penniless to
Arizona in those days long gone when he was only a boy and Arizona a
strong man's country. It was this side of him that brought him
triumphantly through those hard years of the Indian troubles, and in
those wild and lawless times made him respected and feared by the
evildoers and trusted and followed by those of his kind who, out of the
hardships and dangers of those turbulent days, made the Arizona of
to-day. It was this side, too, that finally made the barefoot, penniless
boy the owner of the Cross-Triangle Ranch.

I do not know the exact number of the Dean's years--I only know that his
hair is grey, and that he does not ride as much as he once did. I have
heard him say, though, that for thirty-five years he lived in the
saddle, and that the Cross-Triangle brand is one of the oldest irons in
the State. And I know, too, that his back is still flat and broad and
straight.

The Dean's front, so well-rounded and hearty, indicates as clearly the
other side of his character. And it is this side that belongs to the
full red cheeks, the ever-ready chuckle or laugh; that puts the twinkle
in the blue eyes, and the kindly tones in his deep voice. It is this
side of the Dean's character that adds so large a measure of love to the
respect and confidence accorded him by neighbors and friends, business
associates and employees. It is this side of the Dean, too, that, in
these days, sits in the shade of the big walnut trees--planted by his
own hand--and talks to the youngsters of the days that are gone, and
that makes the young riders of this generation seek him out for counsel
and sympathy and help.

Three things the Dean knows--cattle and horses and men. One thing the
Dean will not, cannot tolerate--weakness in one who should be strong.
Even bad men he admires, if they are strong--not for their badness, but
for their strength. Mistaken men he loves in spite of their mistakes--if
only they be not weaklings. There is no place anywhere in the Dean's
philosophy of life for a weakling. I heard him tell a man once--nor
shall I ever forget it--"You had better die like a man, sir, than live
like a sneaking coyote."

The Dean's sons, men grown, were gone from the home ranch to the fields
and work of their choosing. Little Billy, a nephew of seven years,
was--as Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin said laughingly--their second crop.

When Phil's horse--satisfied--lifted his dripping muzzle from the
watering trough, the Dean walked with his young foreman to the saddle
shed. Neither of the men spoke, for between them there was that
companionship which does not require a constant flow of talk to keep it
alive. Not until the cowboy had turned his horse loose, and was hanging
saddle and bridle on their accustomed peg did the older man speak.

"Jim Reid's goin' to begin breakin' horses next week."

"So I heard," returned Phil, carefully spreading his saddle blanket to
dry.

The Dean spoke again in a tone of indifference. "He wants you to help
him."

"Me! What's the matter with Jack?"

"He's goin' to the D.1 to-morrow."

Phil was examining the wrapping on his saddle horn with--the Dean
noted--quite unnecessary care.

"Kitty was over this mornin'," said the Dean gently.

The young man turned, and, taking off his spurs, hung them on the saddle
horn. Then as he kicked off his leather chaps he said shortly, "I'm not
looking for a job as a professional bronco-buster."

The Dean's eyes twinkled. "Thought you might like to help a neighbor
out; just to be neighborly, you know."

"Do you want me to ride for Reid?" demanded Phil.

"Well, I suppose as long as there's broncs to bust somebody's got to
bust 'em," the Dean returned, without committing himself. And then, when
Phil made no reply, he added laughing, "I told Kitty to tell him,
though, that I reckoned you had as big a string as you could handle
here."

As they moved away toward the house, Phil returned with significant
emphasis, "When I have to ride for anybody besides you it won't be Kitty
Reid's father."

And the Dean commented in his reflective tone, "It does sometimes seem
to make a difference who a man rides for, don't it?"

In the pasture by the corrals, the horses that awaited the approaching
trial that would mark for them the beginning of a new life passed a
restless night. Some in meekness of spirit or, perhaps, with deeper
wisdom fed quietly. Others wandered about aimlessly, snatching an
occasional uneasy mouthful of grass, and looking about often in troubled
doubt. The more rebellious ones followed the fence, searching for some
place of weakness in the barbed barrier that imprisoned them. And one,
who, had he not been by circumstance robbed of his birthright, would
have been the strong leader of a wild band, stood often with wide
nostrils and challenging eye, gazing toward the corrals and buildings as
if questioning the right of those who had brought him there from the
haunts he loved.

And somewhere in the night of that land which was as unknown to him as
the meadow pasture was strange to the unbroken horses, a man awaited the
day which, for him too, was to stand through all his remaining years as
a mark between the old life and the new.

As Phil Acton lay in his bed, with doors and windows open wide to
welcome the cool night air, he heard the restless horses in the near-by
pasture, and smiled as he thought of the big bay and the morrow--smiled
with the smile of a man who looks forward to a battle worthy of his best
strength and skill.

And then, strangely enough, as he was slipping into that dreamless sleep
of those who live as he lived, his mind went back again to the stranger
whom he had met on the summit of the Divide. If he were more like that
man, would it make any difference--the cowboy wondered.




CHAPTER IV.

AT THE CORRAL.


In the beginning of the morning, when Granite Mountain's fortress-like
battlements and towers loomed gray and bold and grim, the big bay horse
trumpeted a warning to his less watchful mates. Instantly, with heads
high and eyes wide, the band stood in frightened indecision. Two
horsemen--shadowy and mysterious forms in the misty light--were riding
from the corral into the pasture.

As the riders approached, individuals in the band moved uneasily,
starting as if to run, hesitating, turning for another look, maneuvering
to put their mates between them and the enemy. But the bay went boldly a
short distance toward the danger and stood still with wide nostrils and
fierce eyes as though ready for the combat.

For a few moments, as the horsemen seemed about to go past, hope beat
high in the hearts of the timid prisoners. Then the riders circled to
put the band between themselves and the corral gate, and the frightened
animals knew. But always as they whirled and dodged in their attempts to
avoid that big gate toward which they were forced to move, there was a
silent, persistent horseman barring the way. The big bay alone, as
though realizing the futility of such efforts and so conserving his
strength for whatever was to follow, trotted proudly, boldly into the
corral, where he stood, his eyes never leaving the riders, as his mates
crowded and jostled about him.

"There's one in that bunch that's sure aimin' to make you ride some,"
said Curly Elson with a grin, to Phil, as the family sat at breakfast.

On the Cross-Triangle the men who were held through the summer and
winter seasons between the months of the rodeos were considered members
of the family. Chosen for their character, as well as for their
knowledge of the country and their skill in their work the Dean and
"Stella," as Mrs. Baldwin is called throughout all that country, always
spoke of them affectionately as "our boys." And this, better than
anything that could be said, is an introduction to the mistress of the
Cross-Triangle household.

At the challenging laugh which followed Curly's observation, Phil
returned quietly with his sunny smile, "Maybe I'll quit him before he
gets good and started."

"He's sure fixin' to make you back the decision of them contest judges,"
offered Bob Colton.

And Mrs. Baldwin, young in spirit as any of her boys, added, "Better not
wear your medal, son. It might excite him to know that you are the
champion buster of Arizona."

"Shucks!" piped up Little Billy excitedly, "Phil can ride anything what
wears hair, can't you, Phil?"

Phil, embarrassed at the laughter which followed, said, with tactful
seriousness, to his little champion, "That's right, kid. You stand up
for your pardner every time, don't you? You'll be riding them yourself
before long. There's a little sorrel in that bunch that I've picked out
to gentle for you." He glanced at his employer meaningly, and the Dean's
face glowed with appreciation of the young man's thoughtfulness. "That
old horse, Sheep, of yours," continued Phil to Little Billy, "is getting
too old and stiff for your work. I've noticed him stumbling a lot
lately." Again he glanced inquiringly at the Dean, who answered the look
with a slight nod of approval.

"You'd better make him gentle your horse first, Billy," teased Curly.
"He might not be in the business when that big one gets through with
him."

Little Billy's retort came in a flash. "Huh, 'Wild Horse Phil' will be
a-ridin' 'em long after you've got your'n, Curly Elson."

"Look out, son," cautioned the Dean, when the laugh had gone round
again. "Curly will be slippin' a burr under your saddle, if you don't."
Then to the men: "What horse is it that you boys think is goin' to be
such a bad one? That big bay with the blazed face?"

The cowboys nodded.

"He's bad, all right," said Phil.

"Well," commented the Dean, leaning back in his chair and speaking
generally, "he's sure got a license to be bad. His mother was the
wickedest piece of horse flesh I ever knew. Remember her, Stella?"

"Indeed I do," returned Mrs. Baldwin. "She nearly ruined that Windy Jim
who came from nobody knew where, and bragged that he could ride
anything."

The Dean chuckled reminiscently. "She sure sent Windy back where he came
from. But I tell you, boys, that kind of a horse makes the best in the
world once you get 'em broke right. Horses are just like men, anyhow. If
they ain't got enough in 'em to fight when they're bein' broke, they
ain't generally worth breakin'."

"The man that rides that bay will sure be a-horseback," said Curly.

"He's a man's horse, all right," agreed Bob.

Breakfast over, the men left the house, not too quietly, and laughing,
jesting and romping like school boys, went out to the corrals, with
Little Billy tagging eagerly at their heels. The Dean and Phil remained
for a few minutes at the table.

"You really oughtn't to say such things to those boys, Will," reproved
Mrs. Baldwin, as she watched them from the window. "It encourages them
to be wild, and land knows they don't need any encouragement."

"Shucks," returned the Dean, with that gentle note that was always in
his voice when he spoke to her. "If such talk as that can hurt 'em,
there ain't nothin' that could save 'em. You're always afraid somebody's
goin' to go bad. Look at me and Phil here," he added, as they in turn
pushed their chairs back from the table; "you've fussed enough over us
to spoil a dozen men, and ain't we been a credit to you all the time?"

At this they laughed together. But as Phil was leaving the house Mrs.
Baldwin stopped him at the door to say earnestly, "You will be careful
to-day, won't you, son? You know my other Phil--" She stopped and turned
away.

The young man knew that story--a story common to that land where the
lives of men are not infrequently offered a sacrifice to the untamed
strength of the life that in many forms they are daily called upon to
meet and master.

"Never mind, mother," he said gently. "I'll be all right." Then more
lightly he added, with his sunny smile, "If that big bay starts anything
with me, I'll climb the corral fence pronto."

Quietly, as one who faces a hard day's work, Phil went to the saddle
shed where he buckled on chaps and spurs. Then, after looking carefully
to stirrup leathers, cinch and latigos, he went on to the corrals, the
heavy saddle under his arm.

Curly and Bob, their horses saddled and ready, were making animated
targets of themselves for Little Billy, who, mounted on Sheep, a gentle
old cow-horse, was whirling a miniature riata. As the foreman appeared,
the cowboys dropped their fun, and, mounting, took the coils of their
own rawhide ropes in hand.

"Which one will you have first, Phil?" asked Curly, as he moved toward
the gate between the big corral and the smaller enclosure that held the
band of horses.

"That black one with the white star will do," directed Phil quietly.
Then to Little Billy: "You'd better get back there out of the way,
pardner. That black is liable to jump clear over you and Sheep."

"You better get outside, son," amended the Dean, who had come out to
watch the beginning of the work.

"No, no--please, Uncle Will," begged the lad. "They can't get me as long
as I'm on Sheep."

Phil and the Dean laughed.

"I'll look out for him," said the young man. "Only," he added to the
boy, "you must keep out of the way."

"And see that you stick to Sheep, if you expect him to take care of
you," finished the Dean, relenting.

Meanwhile the gate between the corrals had been thrown open, and with
Bob to guard the opening Curly rode in among the unbroken horses to cut
out the animal indicated by Phil, and from within that circular
enclosure, where the earth had been ground to fine powder by hundreds of
thousands of frightened feet, came the rolling thunder of quick-beating
hoofs as in a swirling cloud of yellow dust the horses rushed and leaped
and whirled. Again and again the frightened animals threw themselves
against the barrier that hemmed them in; but that fence, built of cedar
posts set close in stockade fashion and laced on the outside with wire,
was made to withstand the maddened rush of the heaviest steers. And
always, amid the confusion of the frenzied animals, the figure of the
mounted man in their midst could be seen calmly directing their wildest
movements, and soon, out from the crowding, jostling, whirling mass of
flying feet and tossing manes and tails, the black with the white star
shot toward the gate. Bob's horse leaped aside from the way. Curly's
horse was between the black and his mates, and before the animal could
gather his confused senses he was in the larger corral. The day's work
had begun.

The black dodged skillfully, and the loop of Curly's riata missed the
mark.

"You better let somebody put eyes in that rope, Curly," remarked Phil,
laconically, as he stepped aside to avoid a wild rush.

The chagrined cowboy said something in a low tone, so that Little Billy
could not hear.

The Dean chuckled.

Bob's riata whirled, shot out its snaky length, and his trained horse
braced himself skillfully to the black's weight on the rope. For a few
minutes the animal at the loop end of the riata struggled
desperately--plunging, tugging, throwing himself this way and that; but
always the experienced cow-horse turned with his victim and the rope was
never slack. When his first wild efforts were over and the black stood
with his wide braced feet, breathing heavily as that choking loop began
to tell, the strain on the taut riata was lessened, and Phil went
quietly toward the frightened captive.

No one moved or spoke. This was not an exhibition the success of which
depended on the vicious wildness of the horse to be conquered. This was
work, and it was not Phil's business to provoke the black to extremes in
order to exhibit his own prowess as a rider for the pleasure of
spectators who had paid to see the show. The rider was employed to win
the confidence of the unbroken horse entrusted to him; to force
obedience, if necessary; to gentle and train, and so make of the wild
creature a useful and valuable servant for the Dean.

There are riders whose methods demand that they throw every unbroken
horse given them to handle, and who gentle an animal by beating it about
the head with loaded quirts, ripping its flanks open with sharp spurs
and tearing its mouth with torturing bits and ropes. These turn over to
their employers as their finished product horses that are broken,
indeed--but broken only in spirit, with no heart or courage left to
them, with dispositions ruined, and often with physical injuries from
which they never recover. But riders of such methods have no place among
the men employed by owners of the Dean's type. On the Cross-Triangle,
and indeed on all ranches where conservative business principles are in
force, the horses are handled with all the care and gentleness that the
work and the individuality of the animal will permit.

After a little Phil's hand gently touched the black's head. Instantly
the struggle was resumed. The rider dodged a vicious blow from the
strong fore hoofs and with a good natured laugh softly chided the
desperate animal. And so, presently, the kind hand was again stretched
forth; and then a broad band of leather was deftly slipped over the
black's frightened eyes. Another thicker and softer rope was knotted so
that it could not slip about the now sweating neck, and fashioned into a
hackamore or halter about the animal's nose. Then the riata was loosed.
Working deftly, silently, gently--ever wary of those dangerous
hoofs--Phil next placed blanket and saddle on the trembling black and
drew the cinch tight. Then the gate leading from the corral to the open
range was swung back. Easily, but quickly and surely, the rider swung to
his seat. He paused a moment to be sure that all was right, and then
leaning forward he reached over and raised the leather blindfold. For an
instant the wild, unbroken horse stood still, then reared until it
seemed he must fall, and then, as his forefeet touched the ground again,
the spurs went home, and with a mighty leap forward the frenzied animal
dashed, bucking, plunging, pitching, through the gate and away toward
the open country, followed by Curly and Bob, with Little Billy spurring
old Sheep, in hot pursuit.

For a little the Dean lingered in the suddenly emptied corral. Stepping
up on the end of the long watering trough, close to the dividing fence,
he studied with knowing eye the animals on the other side. Then
leisurely he made his way out of the corral, visited the windmill pump,
looked in on Stella from the kitchen porch, and then saddled Browny, his
own particular horse that grazed always about the place at privileged
ease, and rode off somewhere on some business of his own.

When the black horse had spent his strength in a vain attempt to rid
himself of the dreadful burden that had attached itself so securely to
his back, he was herded back to the corral, where the burden set him
free. Dripping with sweat, trembling in every limb and muscle,
wild-eyed, with distended nostrils and heaving flanks, the black crowded
in among his mates again, his first lesson over--his years of ease and
freedom past forever.

"And which will it be this time?" came Curly's question.

"I'll have that buckskin this trip," answered Phil.

And again that swirling cloud of dust raised by those thundering hoofs
drifted over the stockade enclosure, and out of the mad confusion the
buckskin dashed wildly through the gate to be initiated into his new
life.

And so, hour after hour, the work went on, as horse after horse at
Phil's word was cut out of the band and ridden; and every horse,
according to disposition and temper and strength, was different. While
his helpers did their part the rider caught a few moments rest. Always
he was good natured, soft spoken and gentle. When a frightened animal,
not understanding, tried to kill him, he accepted it as evidence of a
commendable spirit, and, with that sunny, boyish smile, informed his
pupil kindly that he was a good horse and must not make a fool of
himself.

In so many ways, as the Dean had said at breakfast that morning, horses
are just like men.

It was mid-afternoon when the master of the Cross-Triangle again
strolled leisurely out to the corrals. Phil and his helpers, including
Little Billy, were just disappearing over the rise of ground beyond the
gate on the farther side of the enclosure as the Dean reached the gate
that opens toward the barn and house. He went on through the corral,
and slowly, as one having nothing else to do, climbed the little knoll
from which he could watch the riders in the distance. When the horsemen
had disappeared among the scattered cedars on the ridge, a mile or so to
the west, the Dean still stood looking in that direction. But the owner
of the Cross-Triangle was not watching for the return of his men. He was
not even thinking of them. He was looking beyond the cedar ridge to
where, several miles away, a long, mesa-topped mountain showed black
against the blue of the more distant hills. The edge of this high
table-land broke abruptly in a long series of vertical cliffs, the
formation known to Arizonians as rim rocks. The deep shadows of the
towering black wall of cliffs and the gloom of the pines and cedars that
hid the foot of the mountain gave the place a sinister and threatening
appearance.

As he looked, the Dean's kindly face grew somber and stern; his blue
eyes were for the moment cold and accusing; under his grizzled mustache
his mouth, usually so ready to smile or laugh, was set in lines of
uncompromising firmness. In these quiet and well-earned restful years of
the Dean's life the Tailholt Mountain outfit was the only disturbing
element. But the Dean did not permit himself to be long annoyed by the
thoughts provoked by Tailholt Mountain. Philosophically he turned his
broad back to the intruding scene, and went back to the corral, and to
the more pleasing occupation of looking at the horses.

If the Dean had not so abruptly turned his back upon the landscape, he
would have noticed the figure of a man moving slowly along the road
that skirted the valley meadow leading from Simmons to the
Cross-Triangle Ranch.

Presently the riders returned, and Phil, when he had removed saddle,
blanket and hackamore from his pupil, seated himself on the edge of the
watering trough beside the Dean.

"I see you ain't tackled the big bay yet," remarked the older man.

"Thought if I'd let him look on for a while, he might figure it out that
he'd better be good and not get himself hurt," smiled Phil. "He's sure
some horse," he added admiringly. Then to his helpers: "I'll take that
black with the white forefoot this time, Curly."

Just as the fresh horse dashed into the larger corral a man on foot
appeared, coming over the rise of ground to the west; and by the time
that Curly's loop was over the black's head the man stood at the gate.
One glance told Phil that it was the stranger whom he had met on the
Divide.

The man seemed to understand that it was no time for greetings and,
without offering to enter the enclosure, climbed to the top of the big
gate, where he sat, with one leg over the topmost bar, an interested
spectator.

The maneuvers of the black brought Phil to that side of the corral, and,
as he coolly dodged the fighting horse, he glanced up with his boyish
smile and a quick nod of welcome to the man perched above him. The
stranger smiled in return, but did not speak. He must have thought,
though, that this cowboy appeared quite different from the picturesque
rider he had seen at the celebration and on the summit of the Divide.
_That_ Phil Acton had been--as the cowboy himself would have said--"all
togged out in his glad rags." This man wore chaps that were old and
patched from hard service; his shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, was the
color of the corral dirt, and a generous tear revealed one muscular
shoulder; his hat was greasy and battered; his face grimed and streaked
with dust and sweat, but his sunny, boyish smile would have identified
Phil in any garb.

When the rider was ready to mount, and Bob went to open the gate, the
stranger climbed down and drew a little aside. And when Phil, passing
where he stood, looked laughingly down at him from the back of the
bucking, plunging horse, he made as if to applaud, but checked himself
and went quickly to the top of the knoll to watch the riders until they
disappeared over the ridge.

"Howdy! Fine weather we're havin'." It was the Dean's hearty voice. He
had gone forward courteously to greet the stranger while the latter was
watching the riders.

The man turned impulsively, his face lighted with enthusiasm. "By Jove!"
he exclaimed, "but that man can ride!"

"Yes, Phil does pretty well," returned the Dean indifferently. "Won the
championship at Prescott the other day." Then, more heartily: "He's a
mighty good boy, too--take him any way you like."

As he spoke the cattleman looked the stranger over critically, much as
he would have looked at a steer or horse, noting the long limbs, the
well-made body, the strong face and clear, dark eyes. The man's dress
told the Dean simply that the stranger was from the city. His bearing
commanded the older man's respect. The stranger's next statement, as he
looked thoughtfully over the wide Land of valley and hill and mesa and
mountain, convinced the Dean that he was a man of judgment.

"Arizona is a wonderful country, sir--wonderful!"

"Finest in the world, sir," agreed the Dean promptly. "There just
naturally can't be any better. We've got the climate; we've got the
land; and we've got the men."

The stranger looked at the Dean quickly when he said "men." It was worth
much to hear the Dean speak that word.

"Indeed you have," he returned heartily. "I never saw such men."

"Of course you haven't," said the Dean. "I tell you, sir, they just
don't make 'em outside of Arizona. It takes a country like this to
produce real men. A man's got to be a man out here. Of course, though,"
he admitted kindly, "we don't know much except to ride, an' throw a
rope, an' shoot, mebby, once in a while."

The riders were returning and the Dean and the stranger walked back down
the little hill to the corral.

"You have a fine ranch here, Mr. Baldwin," again observed the stranger.

The Dean glanced at him sharply. Many men had tried to buy the
Cross-Triangle. This man certainly appeared prosperous even though he
was walking. But there was no accounting for the queer things that city
men would do.

"It does pretty well," the cattleman admitted. "I manage to make a
livin'."

The other smiled as though slightly embarrassed. Then: "Do you need any
help?"

"Help!" The Dean looked at him amazed.

"I mean--I would like a position--to work for you, you know."

The Dean was speechless. Again he surveyed the stranger with his
measuring, critical look. "You've never done any work," he said gently.

The man stood very straight before him and spoke almost defiantly. "No,
I haven't, but is that any reason why I should not?"

The Dean's eyes twinkled, as they have a way of doing when you say
something that he likes. "I'd say it's a better reason why you should,"
he returned quietly.

Then he said to Phil, who, having dismissed his four-footed pupil, was
coming toward them:

"Phil, this man wants a job. Think we can use him?"

The young man looked at the stranger with unfeigned surprise and with a
hint of amusement, but gave no sign that he had ever seen him before.
The same natural delicacy of feeling that had prevented the cowboy from
discussing the man upon whose privacy he felt he had intruded that
evening of their meeting on the Divide led him now to ignore the
incident--a consideration which could not but command the strange man's
respect, and for which he looked his gratitude.

There was something about the stranger, too, that to Phil seemed
different. This tall, well-built fellow who stood before them so
self-possessed, and ready for anything, was not altogether like the
uncertain, embarrassed, half-frightened and troubled gentleman at whom
Phil had first laughed with thinly veiled contempt, and then had pitied.
It was as though the man who sat that night alone on the Divide had, out
of the very bitterness of his experience, called forth from within
himself a strength of which, until then, he had been only dimly
conscious. There was now, in his face and bearing, courage and decision
and purpose, and with it all a glint of that same humor that had made
him so bitterly mock himself. The Dean's philosophy touching the
possibilities of the man who laughs when he is hurt seemed in this
stranger about to be justified. Phil felt oddly, too, that the man was
in a way experimenting with himself--testing himself as it were--and
being altogether a normal human, the cowboy felt strongly inclined to
help the experimenter. In this spirit he answered the Dean, while
looking mischievously at the stranger.

"We can use him if he can ride."

The stranger smiled understandingly. "I don't see why I couldn't," he
returned in that droll tone. "I seem to have the legs." He looked down
at his long lower limbs reflectively, as though quaintly considering
them quite apart from himself.

Phil laughed.

"Huh," said the Dean, slightly mystified at the apparent understanding
between the young men. Then to the stranger: "What do you want to work
for? You don't look as though you needed to. A sort of vacation, heh?"

There was spirit in the man's answer. "I want to work for the reason
that all men want work. If you do not employ me, I must try somewhere
else."

"Come from Prescott to Simmons on the stage, did you?"

"No, sir, I walked."

"Walked! Huh! Tried anywhere else for a job?"

"No, sir."

"Who sent you out here?"

The stranger smiled. "I saw Mr. Acton ride in the contest. I learned
that he was foreman of the Cross-Triangle Ranch. I thought I would
rather work where he worked, if I could."

The Dean looked at Phil. Phil looked at the Dean. Together they looked
at the stranger. The two cowboys who were sitting on their horses
near-by grinned at each other.

"And what is your name, sir?" the Dean asked courteously.

For the first time the man hesitated and seemed embarrassed. He looked
uneasily about with a helpless inquiring glance, as though appealing for
some suggestion.

"Oh, never mind your name, if you have forgotten it," said the Dean
dryly.

The stranger's roaming eyes fell upon Phil's old chaps, that in every
wrinkle and scar and rip and tear gave such eloquent testimony as to the
wearer's life, and that curious, self-mocking smile touched his lips.
Then, throwing up his head and looking the Dean straight in the eye, he
said boldly, but with that note of droll humor in his voice, "My name is
Patches, sir, Honorable Patches."

The Dean's eyes twinkled, but his face was grave. Phil's face flushed;
he had not failed to identify the source of the stranger's inspiration.
But before either the Dean or Phil could speak a shout of laughter came
from Curly Elson, and the stranger had turned to face the cowboy.

"Something seems to amuse you," he said quietly to the man on the horse;
and at the tone of his voice Phil and the Dean exchanged significant
glances.

The grinning cowboy looked down at the stranger in evident contempt.
"Patches," he drawled. "Honorable Patches! That's a hell of a name, now,
ain't it?"

The man went two long steps toward the mocking rider, and spoke quietly,
but with unmistakable meaning.

"I'll endeavor to make it all of that for you, if you will get off your
horse."

The grinning cowboy, with a wink at his companion, dismounted
cheerfully. Curly Elson was held to be the best man with his hands in
Yavapai County. He could not refuse so tempting an opportunity to add to
his well-earned reputation.

Five minutes later Curly lifted himself on one elbow in the corral dust,
and looked up with respectful admiration to the quiet man who stood
waiting for him to rise. Curly's lip was bleeding generously; the side
of his face seemed to have slipped out of place, and his left eye was
closing surely and rapidly.

"Get up," said the tall man calmly. "There is more where that came from,
if you want it."

The cowboy grinned painfully. "I ain't hankerin' after any more," he
mumbled, feeling his face tenderly.

"It said that my name was Patches," suggested the stranger.

"Sure, Mr. Patches, I reckon nobody'll question that."

"Honorable Patches," again prompted the stranger.

"Yes, sir. You bet; Honorable Patches," agreed Curly with emphasis.
Then, as he painfully regained his feet, he held out his hand with as
nearly a smile as his battered features would permit. "Do you mind
shaking on it, Mr. Honorable Patches? Just to show that there's no hard
feelin's?"

Patches responded instantly with a manner that won Curly's heart.
"Good!" he said. "I knew you would do that when you understood, or I
wouldn't have bothered to show you my credentials."

"My mistake," returned Curly. "It's them there credentials of yourn, not
your name, that's hell."

He gingerly mounted his horse again, and Patches turned back to the Dean
as though apologizing for the interruption.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but--about work?"

The Dean never told anyone just what his thoughts were at that
particular moment; probably because they were so many and so
contradictory and confusing. Whether from this uncertainty of mind; from
a habit of depending upon his young foreman, or because of that
something, which Phil and the stranger seemed to have in common, he
shifted the whole matter by saying, "It's up to Phil here. He's foreman
of the Cross-Triangle. If he wants to hire you, it's all right with me."

At this the two young men faced each other; and on the face of each was
a half questioning, half challenging smile. The stranger seemed to say,
"I know I am at your mercy; I don't expect you to believe in me after
our meeting on the Divide, but I dare you to put me to the test."

And Phil, if he had spoken, might have said, "I felt when I met you
first that there was a man around somewhere. I know you are curious to
see what you would do if put to the test. I am curious, too. I'll give
you a chance." Aloud he reminded the stranger pointedly, "I said we
might use you if you could ride."

Patches smiled his self-mocking smile, evidently appreciating his
predicament. "And I said," he retorted, "that I didn't see why I
couldn't."

Phil turned to his grinning but respectful helpers. "Bring out that bay
with the blazed face."

"Great Snakes!" ejaculated Curly to Bob, as they reached the gate
leading to the adjoining corral. "His name is Patches, all right, but
he'll be pieces when that bay devil gets through with him, if he can't
ride. Do you reckon he can?"

"Dunno," returned Bob, as he unlatched the gate without dismounting. "I
thought he couldn't fight."

"So did I," returned Curly, grimly nursing his battered face. "You cut
out the horse; I can't more'n half see."

It was no trouble to cut out the bay. The big horse seemed to understand
that his time had come. All day he had seen his mates go forth to their
testing, had watched them as they fought with all their strength the
skill and endurance of that smiling, boy-faced man, and then had seen
them as they returned, sweating, trembling, conquered and subdued. As
Bob rode toward him, he stood for one defiant moment as motionless as a
horse of bronze; then, with a suddenness that gave Curly at the gate
barely time to dodge his rush, he leaped forward into the larger arena.

Phil was watching the stranger as the big horse came through the gate.
The man did not move, but his eyes were glowing darkly, his face was
flushed, and he was smiling to himself mockingly--as though amused at
the thought of what was about to happen to him. The Dean also was
watching Patches, and again the young foreman and his employer exchanged
significant glances as Phil turned and went quickly to Little Billy.
Lifting the lad from his saddle and seating him on the fence above the
long watering trough, he said, "There's a grandstand seat for you,
pardner; don't get down unless you have to, and then get down outside.
See?"

At that moment yells of warning, with a "Look out, Phil!" came from
Curly, Bob and the Dean.

A quick look over his shoulder, and Phil saw the big horse with ears
wickedly flat, eyes gleaming, and teeth bared, making straight in his
direction. The animal had apparently singled him out as the author of
his misfortunes, and proposed to dispose of his arch-enemy at the very
outset of the battle. There was only one sane thing to do, and Phil did
it. A vigorous, scrambling leap placed him beside Little Billy on the
top of the fence above the watering trough.

"Good thing I reserved a seat in your grandstand for myself, wasn't it,
pardner?" he smiled down at the boy by his side.

Then Bob's riata fell true, and as the powerful horse plunged and fought
that strangling noose Phil came leisurely down from the fence.

"Where was you goin', Phil?" chuckled the Dean.

"You sure warn't losin' any time," laughed Curly.

And Bob, without taking his eyes from the vicious animal at the end of
his taut riata, and working skillfully with his trained cow-horse to
foil every wicked plunge and wild leap, grinned with appreciation, as he
added, "I'll bet four bits you can't do it again, Phil, without a
runnin' start."

"I just thought I'd keep Little Billy company for a spell," smiled Phil.
"He looked so sort of lonesome up there."

The stranger, at first amazed that they could turn into jest an incident
which might so easily have been a tragedy, suddenly laughed aloud--a
joyous, ringing laugh that made Phil look at him sharply.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Acton," said Patches meekly, but with that droll
voice which brought a glint of laughter into the foreman's eyes and
called forth another chuckle from the Dean.

"You can take my saddle," said Phil pointedly. "It's over there at the
end of the watering trough. You'll find the stirrups about right, I
reckon--I ride with them rather long."

For a moment the stranger looked him straight in the eyes, then without
a word started for the saddle. He was half way to the end of the
watering trough when Phil overtook him.

"I believe I'd rather saddle him myself," the cowboy explained quietly,
with his sunny smile. "You see, I've got to teach these horses some cow
sense before the fall rodeo, and I'm rather particular about the way
they're handled at the start."

"Exactly," returned Patches, "I don't blame you. That fellow seems
rather to demand careful treatment, doesn't he?"

Phil laughed. "Oh, you don't need to be too particular about his
feelings once you're up in the middle of him," he retorted.

The big bay, instead of acquiring sense from his observations, as Phil
had expressed to the Dean a hope that he would, seemed to have gained
courage and determination. Phil's approach was the signal for a mad
plunge in the young man's direction, which was checked by the skill and
weight of Bob's trained cow-horse on the rope. Several times Phil went
toward the bay, and every time his advance was met by one of those
vicious rushes. Then Phil mounted Curly's horse, and from his hand the
loop of another riata fell over the bay's head. Shortening his rope by
coiling it in his rein hand, he maneuvered the trained horse closer and
closer to his struggling captive, until, with Bob's co-operation on the
other side of the fighting animal, he could with safety fix the leather
blindfold over those wicked eyes.

When at last hackamore and saddle were in place, and the bay stood
trembling and sweating, Phil wiped the perspiration from his own
forehead and turned to the stranger.

"Your horse is ready, sir."

The man's face was perhaps a shade whiter than its usual color, but his
eyes were glowing, and there was a grim set look about his smiling lips
that made the hearts of those men go out to him. He seemed to realize so
that the joke was on himself, and with it all exhibited such reckless
indifference to consequences. Without an instant's hesitation he started
toward the horse.

"Great Snakes!" muttered Curly to Bob, "talk about nerve!"

The Dean started forward. "Wait a minute, Mr. Patches," he said.

The stranger faced him.

"Can you ride that horse?" asked the Dean, pointedly.

"I'm going to," returned Patches. "But," he added with his droll humor,
"I can't say how far."

"Don't you know that he'll kill you if he can?" questioned the Dean
curiously, while his eyes twinkled approval.

"He does seem to have some such notion," admitted Patches.

"You better let him alone," said the Dean. "You don't need to kill
yourself to get a job with this outfit."

"That's very kind of you, sir," returned the stranger gratefully. "I'm
rather glad you said that. But I'm going to ride him just the same."

They looked at him in amazement, for it was clear to them now that the
man really could not ride.

The Dean spoke kindly. "Why?"

"Because," said Patches slowly, "I am curious to see what I will do
under such circumstances, and if I don't try the experiment now I'll
never know whether I have the nerve to do it or not." As he finished he
turned and walked deliberately toward the horse.

Phil ran to Curly's side, and the cowboy at his foreman's gesture leaped
from his saddle. The young man mounted his helper's horse, and with a
quick movement caught the riata from the saddle horn and flipped open a
ready loop.

The stranger was close to the bay's off, or right, side.

"The other side, Patches," called Phil genially. "You want to start in
right, you know."

Not a man laughed--except the stranger.

"Thanks," he said, and came around to the proper side.

"Take your time," called Phil again. "Stand by his shoulder and watch
his heels. Take the stirrup with your right hand and turn it to catch
your foot. Stay back by his shoulder until you are ready to swing up.
Take your time."

"I won't be long," returned Patches, as he awkwardly gained his seat in
the saddle.

Phil moved his horse nearer the center of the corral, and shook out his
loop a little.

"When you're ready, lean over and pull up the blindfold," he called.

The man on the horse did not hesitate. With every angry nerve and muscle
strained to the utmost, the powerful bay leaped into the air, coming
down with legs stiff and head between his knees. For an instant the man
miraculously kept his place. With another vicious plunge and a
cork-screw twist the maddened brute went up again, and this time the man
was flung from the saddle as from a gigantic catapult, to fall upon his
shoulders and back in the corral dust, where he lay still. The horse,
rid of his enemy, leaped again; then with catlike quickness and devilish
cunning whirled, and with wicked teeth bared and vicious, blazing eyes,
rushed for the helpless man on the ground.

With a yell Bob spurred to put himself between the bay and his victim,
but had there been time the move would have been useless, for no horse
could have withstood that mad charge. The vicious brute was within a
bound of his victim, and had reared to crush him with the weight of
heavy hoofs, when a rawhide rope tightened about those uplifted forefeet
and the bay himself crashed to earth. Leaving the cow-horse to hold the
riata tight, Phil sprang from his saddle and ran to the fallen man. The
Dean came with water in his felt hat from the trough, and presently the
stranger opened his eyes. For a moment he lay looking up into their
faces as though wondering where he was, and how he happened there.

"Are you hurt bad?" asked the Dean.

That brought him to his senses, and he got to his feet somewhat
unsteadily, and began brushing the dust from his clothes. Then he looked
curiously toward the horse that Curly was holding down by the simple
means of sitting on the animal's head. "I certainly thought my legs were
long enough to reach around him," he said reflectively. "How in the
world did he manage it? I seemed to be falling for a week."

Phil yelled and the Dean laughed until the tears ran down his red
cheeks, while Bob and Curly went wild.

Patches went to the horse, and gravely walked around him. Then, "Let him
up," he said to Curly.

The cowboy looked at Phil, who nodded.

As the bay regained his feet, Patches started toward him.

"Here," said the Dean peremptorily. "You come away from there."

"I'm going to see if he can do it again," declared Patches grimly.

"Not to-day, you ain't," returned the Dean. "You're workin' for me now,
an' you're too good a man to be killed tryin' any more crazy
experiments."

At the Dean's words the look of gratitude in the man's eyes was almost
pathetic.

"I wonder if I am," he said, so low that only the Dean and Phil heard.

"If you are what?" asked the Dean, puzzled by his manner.

"Worth anything--as a man--you know," came the strange reply.

The Dean chuckled. "You'll be all right when you get your growth. Come
on over here now, out of the way, while Phil takes some of the
cussedness out of that fool horse."

Together they watched Phil ride the bay and return him to his mates a
very tired and a much wiser pupil. Then, while Patches remained to watch
further operations in the corral, the Dean went to the house to tell
Stella all about it.

"And what do you think he really is?" she asked, as the last of a long
list of questions and comments.

The Dean shook his head. "There's no tellin'. A man like that is liable
to be anything." Then he added, with his usual philosophy: "He acts,
though, like a genuine thoroughbred that's been badly mishandled an' has
just found it out."

When the day's work was finished and supper was over Little Billy found
Patches where he stood looking across the valley toward Granite Mountain
that loomed so boldly against the soft light of the evening sky. The man
greeted the boy awkwardly, as though unaccustomed to children. But
Little Billy, very much at ease, signified his readiness to help the
stranger to an intimate acquaintance with the world of which he knew so
much more than this big man.

He began with no waste of time on mere preliminaries.

"See that mountain over there? That's Granite Mountain. There's wild
horses live around there, an' sometimes we catch 'em. Bet you don't know
that Phil's name is 'Wild Horse Phil'."

Patches smiled. "That's a good name for him, isn't it?"

"You bet." He turned and pointed eagerly to the west. "There's another
mountain over there I bet you don't know the name of."

"Which one do you mean? I see several."

"That long, black lookin' one. Do you know about it?"

"I'm really afraid that I don't."

"Well, I'll tell you," said Billy, proud of his superior knowledge.
"That there's Tailholt Mountain."

"Indeed!"

"Yes, and Nick Cambert and Yavapai Joe lives over there. Do you know
about them?"

The tall man shook his head. "No, I don't believe that I do."

Little Billy lowered his voice to a mysterious whisper. "Well, I'll tell
you. Only you mus'n't ever say anything 'bout it out loud. Nick and
Yavapai is cattle thieves. They been a-brandin' our calves, an' Phil,
he's goin' to catch 'em at it some day, an' then they'll wish they
hadn't. Phil, he's my pardner, you know."

"And a fine pardner, too, I'll bet," returned the stranger, as if not
wishing to acquire further information about the men of Tailholt
Mountain.

"You bet he is," came the instant response. "Only Jim Reid, he don't
like him very well."

"That's too bad, isn't it?"

"Yes. You see, Jim Reid is Kitty's daddy. They live over there." He
pointed across the meadow to where, a mile away, a light twinkled in the
window of the Pot-Hook-S ranch house. "Kitty Reid's a mighty nice girl,
I tell you, but Jim, he says that there needn't no cow-puncher come
around tryin' to get her, 'cause she's been away to school, you know,
an' I think Phil--"

"Whoa! Hold on a minute, sonny," interrupted Patches hastily.

"What's the matter?" questioned Little Billy.

"Why, it strikes me that a boy with a pardner like 'Wild Horse Phil'
ought to be mighty careful about how he talked over that pardner's
private affairs with a stranger. Don't you think so?"

"Mebby so," agreed Billy. "But you see, I know that Phil wants Kitty
'cause--"

"Sh! What in the world is that?" whispered Patches in great fear,
catching his small companion by the arm.

"That! Don't you know an owl when you hear one? Gee! but you're a
tenderfoot, ain't you?" Catching sight of the Dean who was coming toward
them, he shouted gleefully. "Uncle Will, Mr. Patches is scared of an
owl. What do you know about that; Patches is scared of an owl!"

"Your Aunt Stella wants you," laughed the Dean.

And Billy ran off to the house to share his joke on the tenderfoot with
his Aunt Stella and his "pardner," Phil.

"I've got to go to town to-morrow," said the Dean. "I expect you better
go along and get your trunk, or whatever you have and some sort of an
outfit. You can't work in them clothes."

Patches answered hesitatingly. "Why, I think I can get along all right,
Mr. Baldwin."

"But you'll want your stuff--your trunk or grip--or whatever you've
got," returned the Dean.

"But I have nothing in Prescott," said the stranger slowly.

"You haven't? Well, you'll need an outfit anyway," persisted the
cattleman.

"Really, I think I can get along for a while," Patches returned
diffidently.

The Dean considered for a little; then he said with straightforward
bluntness, but not at all unkindly, "Look here, young man, you ain't
afraid to go to Prescott, are you?"

The other laughed. "Not at all, sir. It's not that. I suppose I must
tell you now, though. All the clothes I have are on my back, and I
haven't a cent in the world with which to buy an outfit, as you call
it."

The Dean chuckled. "So that's it? I thought mebby you was dodgin' the
sheriff. If it's just plain broke that's the matter, why you'll go to
town with me in the mornin', an' we'll get what you need. I'll hold it
out of your wages until it's paid." As though the matter were settled,
he turned back toward the house, adding, "Phil will show you where
you're to sleep."

When the foreman had shown the new man to his room, the cowboy asked
casually, "Found the goat ranch, all right, night before last, did you?"

The other hesitated; then he said gravely, "I didn't look for it, Mr.
Acton."

"You didn't look for it?"

"No, sir."

"Do you mean to say that you spent the night up there on the Divide
without blankets or anything?"

"Yes, sir, I did."

"And where did you stop last night?"

"At Simmons."

"Walked, I suppose?"

The stranger smiled. "Yes."

"But, look here," said the puzzled cowboy, "I don't mean to be asking
questions about what is none of my business, but I can't figure it out.
If you were coming out here to get a job on the Cross-Triangle, why
didn't you go to Mr. Baldwin in town? Anybody could have pointed him out
to you. Or, why didn't you say something to me, when we were talking
back there on the Divide?"

"Why, you see," explained the other lamely, "I didn't exactly want to
work on the Cross-Triangle, or anywhere."

"But you told Uncle Will that you wanted to work here, and you were on
your way when I met you."

"Yes, I know, but you see--oh, hang it all, Mr. Acton, haven't you ever
wanted to do something that you didn't want to do? Haven't you ever been
caught in a corner that you were simply forced to get out of when you
didn't like the only way that would get you out? I don't mean anything
criminal," he added, with a short laugh.

"Yes, I have," returned the other seriously, "and if you don't mind
there's no handle to my name. Around here I'm just plain Phil, Mr.
Patches."

"Thanks. Neither does Patches need decorating."

"And now, one more," said Phil, with his winning smile. "Why in the
name of all the obstinate fools that roam at large did you walk out here
when you must have had plenty of chances to ride?"

"Well, you see," said Patches slowly, "I fear I can't explain, but it
was just a part of my job."

"Your job! But you didn't have any job until this afternoon."

"Oh, yes, I did. I had the biggest kind of a job. You see, that's what I
was doing on the Divide all night; trying to find some other way to do
it."

"And do you mind telling me what that job is?" asked Phil curiously.

Patches laughed as though at himself. "I don't know that I can,
exactly," he said. "I think, perhaps, it's just to ride that big bay
horse out there."

Phil laughed aloud--a hearty laugh of good-fellowship. "You'll do that
all right."

"Do you think so, really," asked Patches, eagerly.

"Sure; I know it."

"I wish I could be sure," returned the strange man doubtfully--and the
cowboy, wondering, saw that wistful look in his eyes.

"That big devil is a man's horse, all right," mused Phil.

"Why, of course--and that's just it--don't you see?" cried the other
impulsively. Then, as if he regretted his words, he asked quickly, "Do
you name your horses?"

"Sure," answered the cowboy; "we generally find something to call them."

"And have you named the big bay yet?"

Phil laughed. "I named him yesterday, when he broke away as we were
bringing the bunch in, and I had to rope him to get him back."

"And what did you name him?"

"Stranger."

"Stranger! And why Stranger?"

"Oh, I don't know. Just one of my fool notions," returned Phil.
"Good-night!"




CHAPTER V.

A BIT OF THE PAST.


The next morning Mr. Baldwin and Patches set out for town.

"I suppose," said the Dean, and a slightly curious tone colored the
remark, "that mebby you've been used to automobiles. Buck and Prince
here, an' this old buckboard will seem sort of slow to you."

Patches was stepping into the rig as the Dean spoke. As the young man
took his seat by the cattleman's side, the Dean nodded to Phil who was
holding the team. At the signal Phil released the horses' heads and
stepped aside, whereupon Buck and Prince, of one mind, looked back over
their shoulders, made a few playful attempts to twist themselves out of
the harness, lunged forward their length, stood straight up on their
hind feet, then sprang away as if they were fully determined to land
that buckboard in Prescott within the next fifteen minutes.

"Did you say slow?" questioned Patches, as he clung to his seat.

The Dean chuckled and favored his new man with a twinkling glance of
approval.

A few seconds later, on the other side of the sandy wash, the Dean
skillfully checked their headlong career, with a narrow margin of safety
between the team and the gate.

"I reckon we'll get through with less fuss if you'll open it," he said
to Patches. Then to Buck and Prince: "Whoa! you blamed fools. Can't you
stand a minute?"

"Stella's been devilin' me to get a machine ever since Jim Reid got
his," he continued, while the horses were repeating their preliminary
contortions, and Patches was regaining his seat. "But I told her I'd be
scared to death to ride in the fool contraption."

At this Buck and Prince, in a wild riot of animal strength and spirit,
leaped a slight depression in the road with such vigor that the front
wheels of the buckboard left the ground. Patches glanced sidewise at his
employer, with a smile of delighted appreciation, but said nothing.

The Dean liked him for that. The Dean always insists that the hardest
man in the world to talk to is the one who always has something to say
for himself.

"Why," he continued, with a burst of honest feeling, "if I was ever to
bring one of them things home to the Cross-Triangle, I'd be ashamed to
look a horse or steer in the face."

They dashed through a patch of wild sunflowers that in the bottom lands
grow thick and rank; whirled past the tumble-down corner of an old fence
that enclosed a long neglected garden; and dashed recklessly through a
deserted and weed-grown yard. On one side of the road was the ancient
barn and stable, with sagging, weather-beaten roof, leaning walls and
battered doors that hung dejectedly on their rusty and broken hinges.
The corral stockade was breached in many places by the years that had
rotted the posts. The old-time windlass pump that, operated by a blind
burro, once lifted water for the long vanished herds, was a pathetic old
wreck, incapable now of offering drink to a thirsty sparrow. On their
other hand, beneath the wide branches of giant sycamores and walnuts,
and backed by a tangled orchard wilderness, stood an old house, empty
and neglected, as if in the shadowy gloom of the untrimmed trees it
awaited, lonely and forlorn, the kindly hand of oblivion.

"This is the old Acton homestead," said the Dean quietly, as one might
speak beside an ancient grave.

Then as they were driving through the narrow lane that crosses the great
meadow, he indicated with a nod of his head group of buildings on the
other side of the green fields, and something less than a mile to the
south.

"That's Jim Reid's place. His iron is the Pot-Hook-S. Jim's stock runs
on the old Acton range, but the homestead belongs to Phil yet. Jim
Reid's a fine man." The Dean spoke stoutly, almost as though he were
making the assertion to convince himself. "Yes, sir, Jim's all right.
Good neighbor; good cowman; square as they make 'em. Some folks seem to
think he's a mite over-bearin' an' rough-spoken sometimes, and he's kind
of quick at suspicionin' everybody; but Jim and me have always got along
the best kind."

Again the Dean was silent, as though he had forgotten the man beside him
in his occupation with thoughts that he could not share.

When they had crossed the valley meadows and, climbing the hill on the
other side, could see the road for several miles ahead, the Dean pointed
to a black object on the next ridge.

"There's Jim's automobile now. They're headin' for Prescott, too.
Kitty's drivin', I reckon. I tell Stella that that machine and Kitty's
learnin' to run the thing is about all the returns that Jim can show for
the money he's spent in educatin' her. I don't mean," he added, with a
quick look at Patches, as though he feared to be misunderstood, "that
Kitty's one of them good-for-nothin' butterfly girls. She ain't that by
a good deal. Why, she was raised right here in this neighborhood, an' we
love her the same as if she was our own. She can cook a meal or make a
dress 'bout as well as her mother, an' does it, too; an' she can ride a
horse or throw a rope better'n some punchers I've seen, but--" The Dean
stopped, seemingly for want of words to express exactly his thought.

"It seems to me," offered Patches abstractedly, "that education, as we
call it, is a benefit only when it adds to one's life. If schooling or
culture, or whatever you choose to term it, is permitted to rob one of
the fundamental and essential elements of life, it is most certainly an
evil."

"That's the idea," exclaimed the Dean, with frank admiration for his
companion's ability to say that which he himself thought. "You say it
like a book. But that's it. It ain't the learnin' an' all the stuff that
Kitty got while she was at school that's worryin' us. It's what
she's likely to lose through gettin' 'em. This here modern,
down-to-the-minute, higher livin', loftier sphere, intellectual
supremacy idea is all right if folks'll just keep their feet on the
ground.

"You take Stella an' me now. I know we're old fashioned an' slow an' all
that, an' we've seen a lot of hardships since we was married over in
Skull Valley where she was born an' raised. She was just a girl then,
an' I was only a kid, punchin' steers for a livin'. I suppose we've seen
about as hard times as anybody. At least that's what they would be
called now. But, hell, _we_ didn't think nothin' of it then; we was
happy, sir, and we've been happy for over forty year. I tell you, sir,
we've lived--just lived every minute, and that's a blamed sight more
than a lot of these higher-cultured, top-lofty, half-dead couples that
marry and separate, and separate and marry again now-a-days can say.

"No, sir, 'tain't what a man gets that makes him rich; it's what he
keeps. And these folks that are swoppin' the old-fashioned sort of love
that builds homes and raises families and lets man and wife work
together, an' meet trouble together, an' be happy together, an' grow old
bein' happy together--if they're swoppin' all that for these here new,
down-to-date ideas of such things, they're makin' a damned poor bargain,
accordin' to my way of thinkin'. There is such a thing, sir, as
educatin' a man or woman plumb out of reach of happiness.

"Look at our Phil," the Dean continued, for the man beside him was a
wonderful listener. "There just naturally couldn't be a better all round
man than Phil Acton. He's healthy; don't know what it is to have an
hour's sickness; strong as a young bull; clean, honest, square, no bad
habits, a fine worker, an' a fine thinker, too--even if he ain't had
much schoolin', he's read a lot. Take him any way you like--just as a
man, I mean--an' that's the way you got to take 'em--there ain't a
better man that Phil livin'. Yet a lot of these folks would say he's
nothin' but a cow-puncher. As for that, Jim Reid ain't much more than a
cow-puncher himself. I tell you, I've seen cow-punchers that was mighty
good men, an' I've seen graduates from them there universities that was
plumb good for nothin'--with no more real man about 'em than there is
about one of these here wax dummies that they hang clothes on in the
store windows. What any self-respectin' woman can see in one of them
that would make her want to marry him is more than I've ever been able
to figger out."

If the Dean had not been so engrossed in his own thoughts, he would have
wondered at the strange effect of his words upon his companion. The
young man's face flushed scarlet, then paled as though with sudden
illness, and he looked sidewise at the older man with an expression of
shame and humiliation, while his eyes, wistful and pleading, were filled
with pain. Honorable Patches who had won the admiration of those men in
the Cross-Triangle corrals was again the troubled, shamefaced,
half-frightened creature whom Phil met on the Divide.

But the good Dean did not see, and so, encouraged by the other's
silence, he continued his dissertation. "Of course, I don't mean to say
that education and that sort of thing spoils every man. Now, there's
young Stanford Manning--"

If the Dean had suddenly fired a gun at Patches, the young man could not
have shown greater surprise and consternation. "Stanford Manning!" he
gasped.

At his tone the Dean turned to look at him curiously. "I mean Stanford
Manning, the mining engineer," he explained. "Do you know him?"

"I have heard of him," Patches managed to reply.

"Well," continued the Dean, "he came out to this country about three
years ago--straight from college--and he has sure made good. He's got
the education an' culture an' polish an' all that, an' with it he can
hold his own among any kind or sort of men livin'. There ain't a
man--cow-puncher, miner or anything else--in Yavapai County that don't
take off his hat to Stanford Manning."

"Is he in this country now?" asked Patches, with an effort at
self-control that the Dean did not notice.

"No, I understand his Company called him back East about a month ago.
Goin' to send him to some of their properties up in Montana, I heard."

When his companion made no comment, the Dean said reflectively, as Buck
and Prince climbed slowly up the grade to the summit of the Divide,
"I'll tell you, son, I've seen a good many changes in this country. I
can remember when there wasn't a fence in all Yavapai County--hardly in
the Territory. And now--why the last time I drove over to Skull Valley I
got so tangled up in 'em that I plumb lost myself. When Phil's daddy an'
me was youngsters we used to ride from Camp Verde and Flagstaff clean to
Date Creek without ever openin' a gate. But I can't see that men change
much, though. They're good and bad, just like they've always been--an' I
reckon always will be. There's been leaders and weaklin's and just
betwixt and betweens in every herd of cattle or band of horses that ever
I owned. You take Phil, now. He's exactly like his daddy was before
him."

"His father must have been a fine man," said Patches, with quiet
earnestness.

The Dean looked at him with an approving twinkle. "Fine?" For a few
minutes, as they were rounding the turn of the road on the summit of the
Divide where Phil and the stranger had met, the Dean looked away toward
Granite Mountain. Then, as if thinking aloud, rather than purposely
addressing his companion, he said, "John Acton--Honest John, as
everybody called him--and I came to this country together when we were
boys. Walked in, sir, with some pioneers from Kansas. We kept in touch
with each other all the while we was growin' to be men; punched cattle
for the same outfits most of the time; even did most of our courtin'
together, for Phil's mother an' Stella were neighbors an' great friends
over in Skull Valley. When we'd finally saved enough to get started we
located homesteads close together back there in the Valley, an' as soon
as we could get some sort of shacks built we married the girls and set
up housekeepin'. Our stock ranged together, of course, but John sort of
took care of the east side of the meadows an' I kept more to the west.
When the children came along--John an' Mary had three before Phil, but
only Phil lived--an' the stock had increased an' we'd built some decent
houses, things seemed to be about as fine as possible. Then John went on
a note for a man in Prescott. I tried my best to keep him out of it,
but, shucks! he just laughed at me. You see, he was one of the best
hearted men that ever lived--one of those men, you know, that just
naturally believes in everybody.

"Well, it wound up after a-while by John losin' mighty nigh everything.
We managed to save the homestead, but practically all the stock had to
go. An' it wasn't more than a year after that till Mary died. We never
did know just what was the matter with her--an' after that it seemed
like John never was the same. He got killed in the rodeo that same
fall--just wasn't himself somehow. I was with him when he died.

"Stella and me raised Phil--we don't know any difference between him and
one of our own boys. The old homestead is his, of course, but Jim Reid's
stock runs on the old range. Phil's got a few head that he works with
mine--a pretty good bunch by now--for he's kept addin' to what his
father left, an' I've paid him wages ever since he was big enough. Phil
don't say much, even to Stella an' me, but I know he's figurin' on
fixin' up the old home place some day."

After a long silence the Dean said again, as if voicing some conclusion
of his unspoken thoughts: "Jim Reid is pretty well fixed, you see, an'
Kitty bein' the only girl, it's natural, I reckon, that they should have
ideas about her future, an' all that. I reckon it's natural, too, that
the girl should find ranch life away out here so far from anywhere, a
little slow after her three years at school in the East. She never says
it, but somehow you can most always tell what Kitty's thinkin' without
her speakin' a word."

"I have known people like that," said Patches, probably because there
was so little that he could say.

"Yes, an' when you know Kitty, you'll say, like I always have, that if
there's a man in Yavapai County that wouldn't ride the hoofs off the
best horse in his outfit, night or day, to win a smile from her, he
ought to be lynched."

That afternoon in Prescott they purchased an outfit for Patches, and the
following day set out for the long return drive to the ranch.

They had reached the top of the hill at the western end of the meadow
lane, when they saw a young woman, on a black horse, riding away from
the gate that opens from the lane into the Pot-Hook-S meadow pasture,
toward the ranch buildings on the farther side of the field.

As they drove into the yard at home, it was nearly supper time, and the
men were coming from the corrals.

"Kitty's been over all the afternoon," Little Billy informed them
promptly. "I told her all about you, Patches. She says she's just dyin'
to see you."

Phil joined in the laugh, but Patches fancied that there was a shadow in
the cowboy's usually sunny eyes as the young man looked at him to say,
"That big horse of yours sure made me ride some to-day."




CHAPTER VI.

THE DRIFT FENCE.


The education of Honorable Patches was begun without further delay.
Because Phil's time was so fully occupied with his four-footed pupils,
the Dean himself became the stranger's teacher, and all sorts of odd
jobs about the ranch, from cleaning the pig pen to weeding the garden,
were the text books. The man balked at nothing. Indeed, he seemed to
find a curious, grim satisfaction in accomplishing the most menial and
disagreeable tasks; and when he made mistakes, as he often did, he
laughed at himself with such bitter, mocking humor that the Dean
wondered.

"He's got me beat," the Dean confided to Stella. "There ain't nothin'
that he won't tackle, an' I'm satisfied that the man never did a stroke
of work before in his life. But he seems to be always tryin' experiments
with himself, like he expected himself to play the fool one way or
another, an' wanted to see if he would, an' then when he don't he's as
surprised and tickled as a kid."

The Dean himself was not at all above assisting his new man in those
experiments, and so it happened that day when Patches had been set to
repairing the meadow pasture fence near the lower corrals.

The Dean, riding out that way to see how his pupil was progressing,
noticed a particularly cross-tempered shorthorn bull that had wandered
in from the near-by range to water at the house corral. But Phil and his
helpers were in possession of the premises near the watering trough, and
his shorthorn majesty was therefore even more than usual out of patience
with the whole world. The corrals were between the bull and Patches, so
that the animal had not noticed the man, and the Dean, chuckling to
himself, and without attracting Patches' attention, quietly drove the
ill-tempered beast into the enclosure and shut the gate.

Then, riding around the corral, the Dean called to the young man. When
Patches stood beside his employer, the cattleman said, "Here's a blamed
old bull that don't seem to be feelin' very well. I got him into the
corral all right, but I'm so fat I can't reach him from the saddle. I
wish you'd just halter him with this rope, so I can lead him up to the
house and let Phil and the boys see what's wrong with him."

Patches took the rope and started toward the corral gate. "Shall I put
it around his neck and make a hitch over his nose, like you do a horse?"
he asked, glad for the opportunity to exhibit his newly acquired
knowledge of ropes and horses and things.

"No, just tie it around his horns," the Dean answered. "He'll come, all
right."

The bull, seeing a man on foot at the entrance to his prison, rumbled a
deep-voiced threat, and pawed the earth with angry strength.

For an instant, Patches, with his hand on the latch of the gate, paused
to glance from the dangerous-looking animal, that awaited his coming, to
the Dean who sat on his horse just outside the fence. Then he slipped
inside the corral and closed the gate behind him. The bull gazed at him
a moment as if amazed at the audacity of this mere human, then lowered
his head for the charge.

"Climb that gate, quick," yelled the Dean at the critical moment.

And Patches climbed--not a second too soon.

From his position of safety he smiled cheerfully at the Dean. "He came
all right, didn't he?"

The Dean's full rounded front and thick shoulders shook with laughter,
while SeƱor Bull dared the man on the gate to come down.

"You crazy fool," said the Dean admiringly, when he could speak. "Didn't
you know any better than to go in there on foot?"

"But you said you wanted him," returned the chagrined Patches.

"What I wanted," chuckled the Dean, "was to see if you had nerve enough
to tackle him."

"To tell the truth," returned Patches, with a happy laugh, "that's
exactly what interested me."

But, while the work assigned to Patches during those first days of his
stay on the Cross-Triangle was chiefly those odd jobs which called for
little or no experience, his higher education was by no means neglected.
A wise and gentle old cow-horse was assigned to him, and the Dean taught
him the various parts of his equipment, their proper use, and how to
care for them. And every day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes late
in the afternoon, the master found some errand or business that would
necessitate his pupil riding with him. When Phil or Mrs. Baldwin would
inquire about the Dean's kindergarten, as they called it, the Dean would
laugh with them, but always he would say stoutly, "Just you wait. He'll
be as near ready for the rodeo this fall as them pupils in that
kindergarten of Phil's. He takes to ridin' like the good Lord had made
him specially for that particular job. He's just a natural-born
horseman, or I don't know men. He's got the sense, he's got the nerve,
an' he's got the disposition. He's goin' to make a top hand in a few
months, if"--he always added with twinkling eyes--"he don't get himself
killed tryin' some fool experiment on himself."

"I notice just the same that he always has plenty of help in his
experimentin'," Mrs. Baldwin would return dryly, which saying indicted
not only the Dean but Phil and every man on the Cross-Triangle,
including Little Billy.

Then came that day when Patches was given a task that--the Dean assured
him--is one of the duties of even the oldest and best qualified cowboys.
Patches was assigned to the work of fenceriding. But when the Dean rode
out with his pupil early that morning to where the drift fence begins at
the corner of the big pasture, and explained that "riding a fence"
meant, in ranch language, looking for breaks and repairing any such when
found, he did not explain the peculiarities of that particular kind of
fence.

"I told him to be sure and be back by night," he chuckled, as he
explained Patches' absence at dinner to the other members of the
household.

"That was downright mean of you, Will Baldwin," chided Stella, with her
usual motherly interest in the comfort of her boys. "You know the poor
fellow will lose himself, sure, out in that wild Tailholt Mountain
country."

The boys laughed.

"We'll find him in the morning, all right, mother," reassured Phil.

"He can follow the fence back, can't he?" retorted the Dean. "Or, as far
as that goes, old Snip will bring him home."

"If he knows enough to figger it out, or to let Snip have his head,"
said Curly.

"At any rate," the Dean maintained, "he'll learn somethin' about the
country, an' he'll learn somethin' about fences, an' mebby he'll learn
somethin' about horses. An' we'll see whether he can use his own head or
not. There's nothin' like givin' a man a chance to find out things for
himself sometimes. Besides, think what a chance he'll have for some of
his experiments! I'll bet a yearling steer that when we do see him
again, he'll be tickled to death at himself an' wonderin' how he had the
nerve to do it."

"To do what?" asked Mrs. Baldwin.

"I don't know what," chuckled the Dean; "but he's bound to do some fool
thing or other just to see if he can, and it'll be somethin' that nobody
but him would ever think of doin', too."

But Honorable Patches did not get lost that day--that is, not too badly
lost. There was a time, though--but that does not belong just here.

Patches was very well pleased with the task assigned to him that
morning. For the first time he found himself trusted alone with a horse,
on a mission that would keep him the full day in the saddle, and would
take him beyond sight of the ranch house. Very bravely he set out,
equipped with his cowboy regalia--except the riata, which the Dean,
fearing experiments, had, at the last moment, thoughtfully borrowed--and
armed with a fencing tool and staples. He was armed, too, with a
brand-new "six-gun" in a spick and span holster, on a shiny belt of
bright cartridges. The Dean had insisted on this, alleging that the
embryo cowboy might want it to kill a sick cow or something.

Patches wondered if he would know a sick cow if he should meet one, or
how he was to diagnose the case to ascertain if she were sick enough to
kill.

The first thing he did, when the Dean was safely out of sight, was to
dismount and examine his saddle girth. Always your real king of the
cattle range is careful for the foundation of his throne. But there was
no awkwardness, now, when he again swung to his seat. The young man was
in reality a natural athlete. His work had already taken the soreness
and stiffness out of his unaccustomed muscles, and he seemed, as the
Dean had said, a born horseman. And as he rode, he looked about over the
surrounding country with an expression on independence, freedom and
fearlessness very different from the manner of the troubled man who had
faced Phil Acton that night on the Divide. It was as though the spirit
of the land was already working its magic within this man, too. He
patted the holster at his side, felt the handle of the gun, lovingly
fingered the bright cartridges in his shiny belt, leaned sidewise to
look admiringly down at his fringed, leather chaps and spur ornamented
boot heels, and wished for his riata--not forgetting, meanwhile, to scan
the fence for places that might need his attention.

The guardian angel who cares for the "tenderfoot" was good to Patches
that day, and favored him with many sagging wires and leaning or broken
posts, so that he could not ride far. Being painstaking and
conscientious in his work, he had made not more than four miles by the
beginning of the afternoon. Then he found a break that would occupy him
for two hours at least. With rueful eyes he surveyed the long stretch of
dilapidated fence. It was time, he reflected, that the Dean sent someone
to look after his property, and dismounting, he went to work,
forgetting, in his interest in the fencing problem, to insure his
horse's near-by attendance. Now, the best of cow-horses are not above
taking advantage of their opportunities. Perhaps Snip felt that
fenceriding with a tenderfoot was a little beneath the dignity of his
cattle-punching years. Perhaps he reasoned that this man who was always
doing such strange things was purposely dismissing him. Perhaps he was
thinking of the long watering trough and the rich meadow grass at home.
Or, perhaps again, the wise old Snip, feeling the responsibility of his
part in training the Dean's pupil, merely thought to give his
inexperienced master a lesson. However it happened, Patches looked up
from his work some time later to find himself alone. In consternation,
he stood looking about, striving to catch a glimpse of the vanished
Snip. Save a lone buzzard that wheeled in curious circles above his head
there was no living thing in sight.

As fast as his heavy, leather chaps and high-heeled, spur-ornamented
boots would permit, he ran to the top of a knoll a hundred yards or so
away. The wider range of country that came thus within the circle of his
vision was as empty as it was silent. The buzzard wheeled nearer--the
strange looking creature beneath it seemed so helpless that there might
be in the situation something of vital interest to the tribe. Even
buzzards must be about their business.

There are few things more humiliating to professional riders of the
range than to be left afoot; and while Patches was far too much a novice
to have acquired the peculiar and traditional tastes and habits of the
clan of which he had that morning felt himself a member, he was, in
this, the equal of the best of them. He thought of himself walking
shamefaced into the presence of the Dean and reporting the loss of the
horse. The animal might be recovered, he supposed, for he was still,
Patches thought, inside the pasture which that fence enclosed. Still
there was a chance that the runaway would escape through some break and
never be found. In any case the vision of the grinning cowboys was not
an attractive one. But at least, thought the amateur cowboy, he would
finish the work entrusted to him. He might lose a horse for the Dean,
but the Dean's fence should be repaired. So he set to work with a will,
and, finishing that particular break, set out on foot to follow the
fence around the field and so back to the lane that would lead him to
the buildings and corrals of the home ranch.

For an hour he trudged along, making hard work of it in his chaps,
boots, and spurs, stopping now and then to drive a staple or brace a
post. The country was growing wilder and more broken, with cedar timber
on the ridges and here and there a pine. Occasionally he could catch a
glimpse of the black, forbidding walls of Tailholt Mountain. But Patches
did not know that it was Tailholt. He only thought that he knew in which
direction the home ranch lay. It seemed to him that it was a long, long
way to the corner of the field--it must be a big pasture, indeed. The
afternoon was well on when he paused on the summit of another ridge to
rest. It, seemed to him that he had never in all his life been quite so
warm. His legs ached. He was tired and thirsty and hungry. It was so
still that the silence hurt, and that fence corner was nowhere in sight.
He could not, now reach home before dark, even should he turn back;
which, he decided grimly, he would not do. He would ride that fence if
he camped three nights on the journey.

Suddenly he sprang to his feet, waving his hat, hallooing and yelling
like a madman. Two horsemen were riding on the other side of the fence,
along the slope of the next ridge, at the edge of the timber. In vain
Patches strove to attract their attention. If they heard him, they gave
no sign, and presently he saw them turn, ride in among the cedars, and
disappear. In desperation he ran along the fence, down the hill, across
the narrow little valley, and up the ridge over which the riders had
gone. On the top of the ridge he stopped again, to spend the last of his
breath in another series of wild shouts. But there was no answer. Nor
could he be sure, even, which way the horsemen had gone.

Dropping down in the shade of a cedar, exhausted by his strenuous
exertion, and wet with honest perspiration, he struggled for breath and
fanned his hot face with his hat. Perhaps he even used some of the
cowboy words that he had heard Curly and Bob employ when Little Billy
was not around After the noise of his frantic efforts, the silence was
more oppressive than ever. The Cross-Triangle ranch house was,
somewhere, endless miles away.

Then a faint sound in the narrow valley below him caught his ear.
Turning quickly, he looked back the way he had come. Was he dreaming, or
was it all just a part of the magic of that wonderful land? A young
woman was riding toward him--coming at an easy swinging lope--and,
following, at the end of a riata, was the cheerfully wise and
philosophic Snip.

Patches' first thought--when he had sufficiently recovered I from his
amazement to think at all--was that the woman rode as he had never seen
a woman ride before. Dressed in the divided skirt of corduroy, the
loose, soft, gray shirt, gauntleted gloves, mannish felt hat, and boots,
usual to Arizona horsewomen, she seemed as much at ease in the saddle as
any cowboy in the land; and, indeed, she was.

As she came up the slope, the man in the shade of the cedar saw that she
was young. Her lithe, beautifully developed body yielded to the movement
of the spirited horse she rode with the unspoiled grace of health and
youth. Still nearer, and he saw her clear cheeks glowing with the
exercise and excitement, her soft, brown hair under the wide brim of the
gray sombrero, and her dark eyes, shining with the fun of her adventure.
Then she saw him, and smiled; and Patches remembered what the Dean had
said: "If there's a man in Yavapai County who wouldn't ride the hoofs
off the best horse in his outfit to win a smile from Kitty Reid, he
ought to be lynched."

As the man stood, hat in hand, she checked her horse, and, in a voice
that matched the smile so full of fun and the clean joy of living
greeted him.

"You are Mr. Honorable Patches, are you not?"

Patches bowed. "Miss Reid, I believe?"

She frankly looked her surprise. "Why, how did you know me?"

"Your good friend, Mr. Baldwin, described you," he smiled.

She colored and laughed to hide her slight embarrassment. "The dear old
Dean is prejudiced, I fear."

"Prejudiced he may be," Patches admitted, "but his judgement is
unquestionable. And," he added gently, as her face grew grave and her
chin lifted slightly, "his confidence in any man might be considered an
endorsement, don't you think?"

"Indeed, yes," she agreed heartily, her slight coldness vanishing
instantly. "The Dean and Stella told me all about you this afternoon, or
I should not have ventured to introduce myself. I am very pleased to
meet you, Mr. Patches," she finished with a mock formality that was
delightful.

"And I am delighted to meet you, Miss Reid, for so many reasons that I
can't begin to tell you of them," he responded laughing. "And now, may I
ask what good magic brings you like a fairy in the story book to the
rescue of a poor stranger in the hour of his despair? Where did you find
my faithless Snip? How did you know where to find me? Where is the
Cross-Triangle Ranch? How many miles is it to the nearest water? Is it
possible for me to get home in time for supper?" Looking down at him she
laughed as only Kitty Reid could laugh.

"You're making fun of me," he charged; "they all do. And I don't blame
them in the least; I have been laughing at myself all day."

"I'll answer your last question first," she returned. "Yes, you can
easily reach the Cross-Triangle in time for supper, if you start at
once. I will explain the magic as we ride."

"You are going to show me the way?" he cried eagerly, starting toward
his horse.

"I really think it would be best," she said demurely.

"Now I know you are a good fairy, or a guardian angel, or something like
that," he returned, setting his foot in the stirrup to mount. Then
suddenly he paused, with, "Wait a minute, please. I nearly forgot." And
very carefully he examined the saddle girth to see that it was tight.

"If you had remembered to throw your bridle rein over Snip's head when
you left him, you wouldn't have needed a guardian angel this time," she
said.

He looked at her blankly over the patient Snip's back.

"And so that was what made him go away? I knew I had done some silly
thing that I ought not. That's the only thing about myself that I am
always perfectly sure of," he added as he mounted. "You see I can always
depend upon myself to make a fool of myself. It was that bad place in
the fence that did it." He pulled up his horse suddenly as they were
starting. "And that reminds me; there is one thing you positively must
tell me before I can go a foot, even toward supper. How much farther is
it to the corner of this field?"

She looked at him in pretty amazement. "To the corner of this field?"

"Yes, I knew, of course, that if I followed the fence it was bound to
lead me around the field and so back to where I started. That's why I
kept on; I thought I could finish the job and get home, even if Snip did
compel me to ride the fence on foot."

"But don't you know that this is a drift fence?" she asked, her eyes
dancing with fun.

"That's what the Dean called it," he admitted. "But if it's drifting
anywhere, it's going end on. Perhaps that's why I couldn't catch the
corner."

"But there is no corner to a drift fence," she cried.

"No corner?"

She shook her head as if not trusting herself to speak.

"And it doesn't go around anything--there is no field?" Again she shook
her head.

"Just runs away out in the country somewhere and stops?"

She nodded. "It must be eighteen or twenty miles from here to the end."

"Well, of all the silly fences!" he exclaimed, looking away to the
mountain peaks toward which he had been so laboriously making his way.
"Honestly, now, do you think that is any way for a respectable fence to
act? And the Dean told me to be sure and get home before dark!"

Then they laughed together--laughed until their horses must have
wondered.

As they rode on, she explained the purpose of the drift fence, and how
it came to an end so many miles away and so far from water that the
cattle do not usually find their way around it.

"And now the magic!" he said. "You have made a most unreasonable,
unconventional and altogether foolish fence appear reasonable, proper
and perfectly sane. Please explain your coming with Snip to my relief."

"Which was also unreasonable, unconventional and altogether foolish?"
she questioned.

"Which was altogether wonderful, unexpected and delightful," he
retorted.

"It is all perfectly simple," she explained. "Being rather--" She
hesitated. "Well, rather sick of too much of nothing at all, you know, I
went over to the Cross-Triangle right after dinner to visit a little
with Stella--professionally."

"Professionally?" he asked.

She nodded brightly. "For the good of my soul. Stella's a famous soul
doctor. The best ever except one, and she lives far away--away back east
in Cleveland, Ohio."

"Yes, I know her, too," he said gravely.

And while they laughed at the absurdity of his assertion, they did not
know until long afterward how literally true it was.

"Of course, I knew about you," she continued. "Phil told me how you
tried to ride that unbroken horse, the last time he was at our house.
Phil thinks you are quite a wonderful man."

"No doubt," said Patches mockingly. "I must have given a remarkable
exhibition on that occasion." He was wondering just how much Phil had
told her.

"And so, you see," she continued, "I couldn't very well help being
interested in the welfare of the stranger who had come among us.
Besides, our traditional western hospitality demanded it; don't you
think?"

"Oh, certainly, certainly. You could really do nothing less than inquire
about me," he agreed politely.

"And so, you see, Stella quite restored my soul health; or at least
afforded me temporary relief."

He met the quizzing, teasing, laughing look in her eyes blankly. "You
are making fun of me again," he said humbly. "I know I ought to laugh at
myself, but--"

"Why, don't you understand?" she cried. "Dr. Stella administered a
generous dose of talk about the only new thing that has happened in this
neighborhood for months and months and months."

"Meaning me?" he asked.

"Well, are you not?" she retorted.

"I guess I am," he smiled. "Well, and then what?"

"Why, then I came away, feeling much better, of course."

"Yes?"

"I was feeling so much better I decided I would go home a roundabout
way; perhaps to the top of Black Hill; perhaps up Horse Wash, where I
might meet father, who would be on his way home from Fair Oaks where he
went this morning."

"I see."

"Well, so I met Snip, who was on his way to the Cross-Triangle. I knew,
of course, that old Snip would be your horse." She smiled, as though to
rob her words of any implied criticism of his horsemanship.

"Exactly," he agreed understandingly.

"And I was afraid that something might have happened; though I couldn't
see how that could be, either, with Snip. And so I caught him--"

He interrupted eagerly. "How?"

"Why, with my riata," she returned, in a matter-of-fact tone, wondering
at his question.

"You caught my horse with your riata?" he repeated slowly.

"And pray how should I have caught him?" she asked.

"But--but, didn't he _run_?"

She laughed. "Of course he ran. They all do that once they get away from
you. But Snip never could outrun my Midnight," she retorted.

He shook his head slowly, looking at her with frank admiration, as
though, for the first time, he understood what a rare and wonderful
creature she was.

"And you can ride and rope like that?" he said doubtfully.

She flushed hotly, and there was a spark of fire in the brown eyes. "I
suppose you are thinking that I am coarse and mannish and all that," she
said with spirit. "By your standards, Mr. Patches, I should have ridden
back to the house, screaming, ladylike, for help."

"No, no," he protested. "That's not fair. I was thinking how wonderful
you are. Why, I would give--what wouldn't I give to be able to do a
thing like that!"

There was no mistaking his earnestness, and Kitty was all sunshine
again, pardoning him with a smile.

"You see," she explained, "I have always lived here, except my three
years at school. Father taught me to use a riata, as he taught me to
ride and shoot, because--well--because it's all a part of this life, and
very useful sometimes; just as it is useful to know about hotels and
time-tables and taxicabs, in that other part of the world."

"I understand," he said gently. "It was stupid of me to notice it. I beg
your pardon for interrupting the story of my rescue. You had just roped
Snip while he was doing his best to outrun Midnight--simple and easy as
calling a taxi--'Number Two Thousand Euclid Avenue, please'--and there
you are."

"Oh, do you know Cleveland?" she cried.

For an instant he was confused. Then he said easily, "Everybody has
heard of the famous Euclid Avenue. But how did you guess where Snip had
left me?"

"Why, Stella had told me that you were riding the drift fence," she
answered, tactfully ignoring the evasion of her question. "I just
followed the fence. So there was no magic about it at all, you see."

"I'm not so sure about the magic," he returned slowly.

"This is such a wonderful country--to me--that one can never be quite
sure about anything. At least, I can't. But perhaps that's because I am
such a new thing."

"And do you like it?" she asked, frankly curious about him.

"Like being a new thing?" he parried. "Yes and No."

"I mean do you like this wonderful country, as you call it?"

"I admire the people who belong to it tremendously," he returned. "I
never met such men before--or such women," he finished with a smile.

"But, do you like it?" she persisted. "Do you like the life--your
work--would you be satisfied to live here always?"

"Yes and No," he answered again, hesitatingly.

"Oh, well," she said, with, he thought, a little bitterness and
rebellion, "it doesn't really matter to you whether you like it or not,
because _you_ are a man. If you are not satisfied with your environment,
you can leave it--go away somewhere else--make yourself a part of some
other life."

He shook his head, wondering a little at her earnestness. "That does not
always follow. Can a man, just because he is a man, always have or do
just what he likes?"

"If he's strong enough," she insisted. "But a woman must always do what
other people like."

He was sure now that she was speaking rebelliously.

She continued, "Can't you, if you are not satisfied with this life here,
go away?"

"Yes, but not necessarily to any life I might desire. Perhaps some
sheriff wants me. Perhaps I am an escaped convict. Perhaps--oh, a
thousand things."

She laughed aloud in spite of her serious mood. "What nonsense!"

"But, why nonsense? What do you and your friends know of me?"

"We know that you are not that kind of a man," she retorted warmly,
"because"--she hesitated--"well, because you are _not_ that sort of a
man."

"Are you sure you don't mean because I am not man enough to make myself
wanted very badly, even by the sheriff?" he asked, and Kitty could not
mistake the bitterness in his voice.

"Why, Mr. Patches!" she cried. "How could you think I meant such a
thing? Forgive me! I was only wondering foolishly what you, a man of
education and culture, could find in this rough life that would appeal
to you in any way. My curiosity is unpardonable, I suppose, but you must
know that we are all wondering why you are here."

"I do not blame you," he returned, with that self-mocking smile, as
though he were laughing at himself. "I told you I could always be
depended upon to make a fool of myself. You see I am doing it now. I
don't mind telling you this much--that I am here for the same reason
that you went to visit Mrs. Baldwin this afternoon."

"For the good of your soul?" she asked gently.

"Exactly," he returned gravely. "For the good of my soul."

"Well, then, Mr. Honorable Patches, here's to your soul's good health!"
she cried brightly, checking her horse and holding out her hand. "We
part here. You can see the Cross-Triangle buildings yonder. I go this
way."

He looked his pleasure, as he clasped her hand in hearty understanding
of the friendship offered.

"Thank you, Miss Reid. I still maintain that the Dean's judgment is
unquestionable."

She was not at all displeased with his reply.

"By the way," she said, as if to prove her friendship. "I suppose you
know what to expect from Uncle Will and the boys when they learn of your
little adventure?"

"I do," he answered, as if resigned to anything.

"And do you enjoy making fun for them?"

"I assure you, Miss Reid, I am very human."

"Well, then, why don't you turn the laugh on them?"

"But how?"

"They are expecting you to get into some sort of a scrape, don't you
think?"

"They are always expecting that. And," he added, with that droll touch
in his voice, "I must say I rarely disappoint them."

"I suspect," she continued, thoughtfully, "that the Dean purposely did
not explain that drift fence to you."

"He has established precedents that would justify my thinking so, I'll
admit."

"Well, then, why don't you ride cheerfully home and report the progress
of your work as though nothing had happened?"

"You mean that you won't tell?" he cried.

She nodded gaily. "I told them this afternoon that it wasn't fair for
you to have no one but Stella on your side."

"What a good Samaritan you are! You put me under an everlasting
obligation to you."

"All right," she laughed. "I'm glad you feel that way about it. I shall
hold that debt against you until some day when I am in dreadful need,
and then I shall demand payment in full. Good-by!"

And once again Kitty had spoken, in jest, words that held for them both,
had they but known, great significance.

Patches watched until she was out of sight. Then he made his way
happily to the house to receive, with a guilty conscience but with a
light heart, congratulations and compliments upon his safe return.

That evening Phil disappeared somewhere, in the twilight. And a little
later Jim Reid rode into the Cross-Triangle dooryard.

The owner of the Pot-Hook-S was a big man, tall and heavy, outspoken and
somewhat gruff, with a manner that to strangers often seemed near to
overbearing. When Patches was introduced, the big cattleman looked him
over suspiciously, spoke a short word in response to Patches'
commonplace, and abruptly turned his back to converse with the
better-known members of the household.

For an hour, perhaps, they chatted about matters of general interest, as
neighbors will; then the caller arose to go, and the Dean walked with
him to his horse. When the two men were out of hearing of the people on
the porch Reid asked in a low voice, "Noticed any stock that didn't look
right lately, Will?"

"No. You see, we haven't been ridin' scarcely any since the Fourth. Phil
and the boys have been busy with the horses every day, an' this new man
don't count, you know."

"Who is he, anyway?" asked Reid bluntly.

"I don't know any more than that he says his name is Patches."

"Funny name," grunted Jim.

"Yes, but there's a lot of funny names, Jim," the Dean answered quietly.
"I don't know as Patches is any funnier than Skinner or Foote or Hogg,
or a hundred other names, when you come to think about it. We ain't
just never happened to hear it before, that's all."

"Where did you pick him up?"

"He just came along an' wanted work. He's green as they make 'em, but
willin', an' he's got good sense, too."

"I'd go slow 'bout takin' strangers in," said the big man bluntly.

"Shucks!" retorted the Dean. "Some of the best men I ever had was
strangers when I hired 'em. Bein' a stranger ain't nothin' against a
man. You and me would be strangers if we was to go many miles from
Williamson Valley. Patches is a good man, I tell you. I'll stand for
him, all right. Why, he's been out all day, alone, ridin' the drift
fence, just as good any old-timer."

"The drift fence!"

"Yes, it's in pretty bad shape in places."

"Yes, an' I ran onto a calf over in Horse Wash, this afternoon, not four
hundred yards from the fence on the Tailholt side, fresh-branded with
the Tailholt iron, an' I'll bet a thousand dollars it belongs to a
Cross-Triangle cow."

"What makes you think it was mine?" asked the Dean calmly.

"Because it looked mighty like some of your Hereford stock, an' because
I came on through the Horse Wash gate, an' about a half mile on this
side, I found one of your cows that had just lost her calf."

"They know we're busy an' ain't ridin' much, I reckon," mused the Dean.

"If I was you, I'd put some hand that I knew to ridin' that drift
fence," returned Jim significantly, as he mounted his horse to go.

"You're plumb wrong, Jim," returned the Dean earnestly. "Why, the man
don't know a Cross-Triangle from a Five-Bar, or a Pot-Hook-S."

"It's your business, Will; I just thought I'd tell you," growled Reid.
"Good-night!"

"Good-night, Jim! I'm much obliged to you for ridin' over."




CHAPTER VII.

THINGS THAT ENDURE.


When Kitty Reid told Patches that it was her soul sickness, from too
much of nothing at all, that had sent her to visit Mrs. Baldwin that
afternoon, she had spoken more in earnest than in jest. More than this,
she had gone to the Cross-Triangle hoping to meet the stranger, of whom
she had heard so much. Phil had told Kitty that she would like Patches.
As Phil had put it, the man spoke her language; he could talk to her of
people and books and those things of which the Williamson Valley folk
knew so little.

But as she rode slowly homeward after leaving Patches, she found herself
of two minds regarding the incident. She had enjoyed meeting the man; he
had interested and amused her; had taken her out of herself, for she was
not slow to recognize that the man really did belong to that world which
was so far from the world of her childhood. And she was glad for the
little adventure that, for one afternoon, at least, had broken the dull,
wearying monotony of her daily life. But the stranger, by the very fact
of his belonging to that other world, had stimulated her desire for
those things which in her home life and environment she so greatly
missed. He had somehow seemed to magnify the almost unbearable
commonplace narrowness of her daily routine. He had made her even more
restless, disturbed and dissatisfied. It had been to her as when one in
some foreign country meets a citizen from one's old home town. And for
this Kitty was genuinely sorry. She did not wish to feel as she did
about her home and the things that made the world of those she loved.
She had tried honestly to still the unrest and to deny the longing. She
had wished many times, since her return from the East, that she had
never left her home for those three years in school. And yet, those
years had meant much to her; they had been wonderful years; but they
seemed, somehow--now that they were past and she was home again--to have
brought her only that unrest and longing.

From the beginning of her years until that first great crisis in her
life--her going away to school--this world into which she was born had
been to Kitty an all-sufficient world. The days of her childhood had
been as carefree and joyous, almost, as the days of the young things of
her father's roaming herds. As her girlhood years advanced, under her
mother's wise companionship and careful teaching, she had grown into her
share of the household duties and into a knowledge of woman's part in
the life to which she belonged, as naturally as her girlish form had put
on the graces of young womanhood. The things that filled the days of her
father and mother, and the days of her neighbors and friends, had filled
her days. The things that were all in all to those she loved had been
all in all to her. And always, through those years, from her earliest
childhood to her young womanhood, there was Phil, her playmate,
schoolmate, protector, hero, slave. That Phil should be her boy
sweetheart and young man lover had seemed as natural to Kitty as her
relation to her parents. There had never been anyone else but Phil.
There never could be--she was sure, in those days--anyone else.

In Kitty's heart that afternoon, as she rode, so indifferent to the life
that called from every bush and tree and grassy hill and distant
mountain, there was sweet regret, deep and sincere, for those years that
were now, to her, so irrevocably gone. Kitty did not know how impossible
it was for her to ever wholly escape the things that belonged to her
childhood and youth. Those things of her girlhood, out of which her
heart and soul had been fashioned, were as interwoven in the fabric of
her being as the vitality, strength and purity of the clean, wholesome,
outdoor life of those same years were wrought into the glowing health
and vigor and beauty of her physical womanhood.

And then had come those other years--the maturing, ripening years--when,
from the simple, primitive and enduring elements of life, she had gone
to live amid complex, cultivated and largely fanciful standards and
values. In that land of Kitty's birth a man is measured by the measure
of his manhood; a woman is ranked by the quality of her womanhood.
Strength and courage, sincerity, honesty, usefulness--these were the
prime essentials of the man life that Kitty had, in those years of her
girlhood, known; and these, too, in their feminine expressions, were the
essentials of the woman life. But from these the young woman had gone
to be educated in a world where other things are of first importance.
She had gone to be taught that these are not the essential elements of
manhood and womanhood. Or, at least, if she was not to be deliberately
so taught, these things would be so ignored and neglected and overlooked
in her training, that the effect on her character would be the same. In
that new world she was to learn that men and women are not to be
measured by the standards of manhood and womanhood--that they were to be
rated, not for strength, but for culture; not for courage, but for
intellectual cleverness; not for sincerity, but for manners; not for
honesty, but for success; not for usefulness, but for social position,
which is most often determined by the degree of uselessness. It was as
though the handler of gems were to attach no value whatever to the
weight of the diamond itself, but to fix the worth of the stone wholly
by the cutting and polish that the crystal might receive.

At first, Kitty had been excited, bewildered and fascinated by the
glittering, sparkling, ever-changing, many-faceted life. Then she had
grown weary and homesick. And then, as the months had passed, and she
had been drawn more and more by association and environment into the
world of down-to-dateism she, too, began to regard the sparkle of the
diamond as the determining factor in the value of the gem. And when the
young woman had achieved this, they called her education finished, and
sent her back to the land over which Granite Mountain, gray and grim and
fortress-like, with its ranks of sentinel bills? keeps enduring and
unchanging watch.

During those first glad days of Kitty's homecoming she had been eagerly
interested in everything. The trivial bits of news about the small
doings of her old friends had been delightful. The home life, with its
simple routine and its sweet companionship, had been restful and
satisfying. The very scenes of her girlhood had seemed to welcome her
with a spirit of genuineness and steadfastness that had made her feel as
one entering a safe home harbor after a long and adventurous voyage to
far-away and little-known lands. And Phil, in the virile strength of his
manhood, in the simple bigness of his character, and in his enduring and
unchanging love, had made her feel his likeness to the primitive land of
his birth.

But when the glad excitement of those first days of her return were
past, when the meetings with old friends were over and the tales of
their doings exhausted, then Kitty began to realize what her education,
as they called it, really meant. The lessons of those three years were
not to be erased from her life as one would erase a mistake in a problem
or a misspelled word. The tastes, habits of thought and standards of
life, the acquirement of which constituted her culture, would not be
denied. It was inevitable that there should be a clash between the
claims of her home life and the claims of that life to which she now
felt that she also belonged.

However odious comparisons may be, they are many times inevitable.
Loyally, Kitty tried to magnify the worth of those things that in her
girlhood had been the supreme things in her life, but, try as she might,
they were now, in comparison with those things which her culture placed
first, of trivial importance. The virile strength and glowing health of
Phil's unspoiled manhood--beautiful as the vigorous life of one of the
wild horses from which he had his nickname--were overshadowed, now, by
the young man's inability to clothe his splendid body in that fashion
which her culture demanded. His simple and primitive views of life--as
natural as the instinct which governs all creatures in his
God-cultivated world--were now unrefined, ignoble, inelegant. His fine
nature and unembarrassed intelligence, which found in the wealth of
realities amid which he lived abundant food for his intellectual life,
and which enabled him to see clearly, observe closely and think with
such clean-cut directness, beside the intellectuality of those schooled
in the thoughts of others, appeared as ignorance and illiteracy. The
very fineness and gentleness of his nature were now the distinguishing
marks of an uncouth and awkward rustic.

With all her woman heart Kitty had fought against these comparisons--and
continued to make them. Everything in her nature that belonged to
Granite Mountain--that was, in short, the product of that land--answered
to Phil's call, as instinctively as the life of that land calls and
answers Its mating calls. Everything that she had acquired in those
three years of a more advanced civilization denied and repulsed him. And
now her meeting with Patches had stirred the warring forces to renewed
activity, and in the distracting turmoil of her thoughts she found
herself hating the land she loved, loathing the life that appealed to
her with such insistent power, despising those whom she so dearly
esteemed and honored, and denying the affection of which she was proud
with a true woman's tender pride.

Kitty was aroused from her absorption by the shrill boyish yells of her
two younger brothers, who, catching sight of their sister from the top
of one of the low hills that edge the meadow bottom lands, were charging
recklessly down upon her.

As the clatter and rumble of those eight flying hoofs drew nearer and
nearer, Midnight, too, "came alive," as the cowboys say, and tossed his
head and pranced with eager impatience.

"Where in the world have you been all the afternoon?" demanded Jimmy,
with twelve-year-old authority, as his pony slid to a halt within a foot
or two of his sister's horse.

And, "We wanted you to go with us, to see our coyote traps," reproved
Conny--two years younger than his brother--as his pinto executed a like
maneuver on the other side of the excited Midnight.

"And where is Jack?" asked the young woman mischievously, as she
smilingly welcomed the vigorous lads.

"Couldn't he help?"

Jack was the other member of the Reid trio of boys--a lusty
four-year-old who felt himself equal to any venture that interested his
brothers.

Jimmy grinned. "Aw, mama coaxed him into the kitchen with something to
eat while me and Conny sneaked down to the corral and saddled up and
beat it."

Big sister's dark eyebrows arched in shocked inquiry, "_Me_ and Conny?"

"That is, Conny and I," amended Jimmy, with good-natured tolerance of
his sister's whims.

"You see, Kitty," put in Conny, "this hero coyote traps pin' ain't just
fun. It's business. Dad's promised us three dollars for every scalp, an'
we're aimin' to make a stake. We didn't git a blamed thing, to-day,
though."

Sister's painful and despairing expression was blissfully ignored as
Jimmy stealthily flicked the long romal at the end of his bridle reins
against Midnight's flank.

"Gee!" observed the tickled youngster, as Kitty gave all her attention
to restraining the fretting and indignant horse, "ol' Midnight is sure
some festive, ain't he?"

"I'll race you both to the big gate," challenged Kitty.

"For how much?" demanded Jimmy quickly.

"You got to give us fifty yards start," declared Conny, leaning forward
in his saddle and shortening his reins.

"If I win, you boys go straight to bed to-night, when it's time, without
fussing," said Kitty, "and I'll give you to that oak bush yonder."

"Good enough! You're on!" they shouted in chorus, and loped away.

As they passed the handicap mark, another shrill, defiant yell came
floating back to where Kitty sat reining in her impatient Midnight. At
the signal, the two ponies leaped from a lope into a full run, while
Kitty loosed the restraining rein and the black horse stretched away in
pursuit. Spurs ring, shouting, entreating, the two lads urged their
sturdy mounts toward the goal, and the pintos answered gamely with all
that they had. Over knolls and washes, across arroyos and gullies they
flew, sure-footed and eager, neck and neck, while behind them, drawing
nearer and nearer, came the black, with body low, head outstretched and
limbs that moved apparently with the timed regularity and driving power
of a locomotive's piston rod. As she passed them, Kitty shouted a merry
"Come on!" which they answered with redoubled exertion and another yell
of hearty boyish admiration for the victorious Midnight and his
beautiful rider.

"Doggone that black streak!" exclaimed Jimmy, his eyes dancing with fun
as they pulled up at the corral gate.

"He opens and shuts like a blamed ol' jack rabbit," commented Conny.
"Seemed like we was just a-sittin' still watchin' you go by."

Kitty laughed, teasingly, and unconsciously slipped into the vernacular
as she returned, "Did you kids think you were a-horseback?"

"You just wait, Miss," retorted the grinning Jimmy, as he opened the big
gate. "I'll get a horse some day that'll run circles around that ol'
black scound'el."

And then, as they dismounted at the door of the saddle room in the big
barn, he added generously, "You scoot on up to the house, Kitty; I'll
take care of Midnight. It must be gettin' near supper time, an' I'm
hungry enough to eat a raw dog."

At which alarming statement Kitty promptly scooted, stopping only long
enough at the windmill pump for a cool, refreshing drink.

Mrs. Reid, with sturdy little Jack helping, was already busy in the
kitchen. She was a motherly woman, rather below Kitty's height, and
inclined somewhat to a comfortable stoutness. In her face was the gentle
strength and patience of those whose years have been spent in
home-making, without the hardness that is sometimes seen in the faces of
those whose love is not great enough to soften their tail. One knew by
the light in her eyes whenever she spoke of Kitty, or, indeed, whenever
the girl's name was mentioned, how large a place her only daughter held
in her mother heart.

While the two worked together at their homely task, the girl related in
trivial detail the news of the neighborhood, and repeated faithfully the
talk she had had with the mistress of the Cross-Triangle, answering all
her mother's questions, replying with careful interest to the older
woman's comments, relating all that was known or guessed, or observed
regarding the stranger. But of her meeting with Patches, Kitty said
little; only that she had met him as she was coming home. All during the
evening meal, too, Patches was the principal topic of the conversation,
though Mr. Reid, who had arrived home just in time for supper, said
little.

When supper was over, and the evening work finished, Kitty sat on the
porch in the twilight, looking away across the wide valley meadows,
toward the light that shone where the walnut trees about the
Cross-Triangle ranch house made a darker mass in the gathering gloom.
Her father had gone to call upon the Dean. The men were at the
bunk-house, from which their voices came low and indistinct. Within the
house the mother was coaxing little Jack to bed. Jimmy and Conny, at the
farther end of the porch, were planning an extensive campaign against
coyotes, and investing the unearned profits of their proposed industry.

Kitty's thoughts were many miles away. In that bright and stirring
life--so far from the gloomy stillness of her home land, where she sat
so alone--what gay pleasures held her friends? Amid what brilliant
scenes were they spending the evening, while she sat in her dark and
silent world alone? As her memory pictured the lights, the stirring
movement, the music, the merry-voiced talk, the laughter, the gaiety,
the excitement, the companionship of those whose lives were so full of
interest, her heart rebelled at the dull emptiness of her days. As she
watched the evening dusk deepen into the darkness of the night, and the
outlines of the familiar landscape fade and vanish in the thickening
gloom, she felt the dreary monotony of the days and years that were to
come, blotting out of her life all tone and color and forms of
brightness and beauty.

Then she saw, slowly emerging from the shadows of the meadow below, a
darker shadow--mysterious, formless--that seemed, as it approached, to
shape itself out of the very darkness through which it came, until,
still dim and indistinct, a horseman was opening the meadow gate. Before
the cowboy answered Jimmy's boyish "Hello!" Kitty knew that it was Phil.

The young woman's first impulse was to retreat to the safe seclusion of
her own room. But, even as she arose to her feet, she knew how that
would hurt the man who had always been so good to her; and so she went
generously down the walk to meet him where he would dismount and leave
his horse.

"Did you see father?" she asked, thinking as she spoke how little there
was for them to talk about.

"Why, no. What's the matter?" he returned quickly, pausing as if ready
to ride again at her word.

She laughed a little at his manner. "There is nothing the matter. He
just went over to see the Dean, that's all."

"I must have missed him crossing the meadow," returned Phil. "He always
goes around by the road."

Then, when he stood beside her, he added gently, "But there is something
the matter, Kitty. What is it? Lonesome for the bright lights?"

That was always Phil's way, she thought. He seemed always to know
instinctively her every mood and wish.

"Perhaps I was a little lonely," she admitted. "I am glad that you
came."

Then they were at the porch, and her ambitious brothers were telling
Phil in detail their all-absorbing designs against the peace of the
coyote tribe, and asking his advice. Mrs. Reid came to sit with them
a-while, and again the talk followed around the narrow circle of their
lives, until Kitty felt that she could bear no more. Then Mrs. Reid,
more merciful than she knew, sent the boys to bed and retired to her own
room.

"And so you are tired of us all, and want to go back," mused Phil,
breaking one of the long, silent periods that in these days seemed so
often to fall upon them when they found themselves alone.

"That's not quite fair, Phil," she returned gently. "You know it's not
that."

"Well, then, tired of this"--his gesture indicated the sweep of the
wide land--"tired of what we are and what we do?"

The girl stirred uneasily, but did not speak.

"I don't blame you," he continued, as if thinking aloud. "It must seem
mighty empty to those who don't really know it."

"And don't I know it?" challenged Kitty. "You seem to forget that I was
born here--that I have lived here almost as many years as you."

"But just the same you don't know," returned Phil gently. "You see,
dear, you knew it as a girl, the same as I did when I was a boy. But
now--well, I know it as a man, and you as a woman know something that
you think is very different."

Again that long silence lay a barrier between them. Then Kitty made the
effort, hesitatingly. "Do you love the life so very, very much, Phil?"

He answered quickly. "Yes, but I could love any life that suited you."

"No--no," she returned hurriedly, "that's not--I mean--Phil, why are you
so satisfied here? There is so little for a man like you."

"So little!" His voice told her that her words had stung. "I told you
that you did not know. Why, everything that a man has a right to want is
here. All that life can give anywhere is here--I mean all of life that
is worth having. But I suppose," he finished lamely, "that it's hard for
you to see it that way--now. It's like trying to make a city man
understand why a fellow is never lonesome just because there's no crowd
around. I guess I love this life and am satisfied with it just as the
wild horses over there at the foot of old Granite love it and are
satisfied."

"But don't you feel, sometimes, that if you had greater
opportunities--don't you sometimes wish that you could live where--" She
paused at a loss for words. Phil somehow always made the things she
craved seem so trivial.

"I know what you mean," he answered. "You mean, don't the wild horses
wish that they could live in a fine stable, and have a lot of men to
feed and take care of them, and rig them out with fancy, gold-mounted
harness, and let them prance down the streets for the crowds to see? No;
horses have more sense than that. It takes a human to make that kind of
a fool of himself. There's only one thing in the world that would make
me want to try it, and I guess you know what that is."

His last words robbed his answer of its sting, and she said gently, "You
are bitter to-night, Phil. It is not like you."

He did not answer.

"Did something go wrong to-day?" she persisted.

He turned suddenly to face her, and spoke with a passion unusual to him.
"I saw you at the ranch this afternoon--as you were riding away. You did
not even look toward the corral where you knew I was at work; and it
seemed like all the heart went clear out of me. Oh, Kitty, girl, can't
we bring back the old days as they were before you went away?"

"Hush, Phil," she said, almost as she would have spoken to one of her
boy brothers.

But he went on recklessly. "No, I'm going to speak to-night. Ever since
you came home you have refused to listen to me--you have put me
off--made me keep still. I want you to tell me, Kitty, if I were like
Honorable Patches, would it make any difference?"

"I do not know Mr. Patches," she answered.

"You met him to-day; and you know what I mean. Would it make any
difference if I were like him?"

"Why, Phil, dear, how can I answer such a question? I do not know."

"Then it's not because I belong here in this country instead of back
East in some city that has made you change?"

"I have changed, I suppose, because I have become a woman, Phil, as you
have become a man."

"Yes, I have become a man," he returned, "but I have not changed, except
that the boy's love has become a man's love. Would it make any
difference, Kitty, if you cared more for the life here--I mean if you
were contented here--if these things that mean so much to us all,
satisfied you?"

Again she answered, "I do not know, Phil. How can I know?"

"Will you try, Kitty--I mean try to like your old home as you used to
like it?"

"Oh, Phil, I have tried. I do try," she cried. "But I don't think it's
the life that I like or do not like that makes the difference. I am
sure, Phil, that if I could"--she hesitated, then went on bravely--"if I
could give you the love you want, nothing else would matter. You said
you could like any life that suited me. Don't you think that I could be
satisfied with any life that suited the man I loved?"

"Yes," he said, "you could; and that's the answer."

"What is the answer?" she asked.

"Love, just love, Kitty--any place with love is a good place, and
without love no life can satisfy. I am glad you said that. It was what I
wanted you to say. I know now what I have to do. I am like Patches. I
have found my job." There was no bitterness in his voice now.

The girl was deeply moved, but--"I don't think I quite understand,
Phil," she said.

"Why, don't you see?" he returned. "My job is to win your love--to make
you love me--for myself--for just what I am--as a man--and not to try to
be something or to live some way that I think you would like. It's the
man that you must love, and not what he does or where he lives. Isn't
that it?"

"Yes," she answered slowly. "I am sure that is so. It must be so, Phil."

He rose to his feet abruptly. "All right," he said, almost roughly.
"I'll go now. But don't make any mistake, Kitty. You're mine, girl,
mine, by laws that are higher than the things they taught you at school.
And you are going to find it out. I am going to win you--just as the
wild things out there win their mates. You are going to come to me,
girl, because you are mine--because you are my mate."

And then, as she, too, arose, and they stood for a silent moment facing
each other, the woman felt his strength, and in her woman heart was
glad--glad and proud, though she could not give all that he asked.

As she watched him ride away into the night, and the soft mystery of the
darkness out of which he had come seemed to take his shadowy form again
to itself, she wondered--wondered with regret in the thought--would he,
perhaps, go thus out of her life? Would he?

When Phil turned his horse into the meadow pasture at home the big bay,
from somewhere in the darkness, trumpeted his challenge. A low laugh
came from near by, and in the light of the stars Phil saw a man standing
by the pasture fence. As he went toward the shadowy figure the voice of
Patches followed the laugh.

"I'll bet that was Stranger."

"I know it was," answered Phil. "What's the matter that you're not in
bed?"

"Oh, I was just listening to the horses out there, and thinking,"
returned Patches.

"Thinking about your job?" asked Phil quietly.

"Perhaps," admitted the other.

"Well, you have no reason to worry; you'll ride him all right," said the
cowboy.

"I wish I could be as sure," the other returned doubt fully.

And they both knew that they were using the big bay horse as a symbol.

"And I wish I was as sure of making good at my job, as I am that you
will win out with yours," returned Phil.

Patches' voice was very kind as he said reflectively, "So, you have a
job, too. I am glad for that."

"Glad?"

"Yes," the tall man placed a hand on the other's shoulder as they turned
to walk toward the house, "because, Phil, I have come to the conclusion
that this old world is a mighty empty place for the man who has nothing
to do."

"But there seems to be a lot of fellows who manage to keep fairly busy
doing nothing, just the same, don't you think?" replied Phil with a low
laugh.

"I said _man_'," retorted Patches, with emphasis.

"That's right," agreed Phil. "A man just naturally requires a man's
job."

"And," mused Patches, "when it's all said and done, I suppose there's
only one genuine, simon-pure, full-sized man's job in the world."

"And I reckon that's right, too," returned the cowboy.




CHAPTER VIII.

CONCERNING BRANDS.


A few days after Jim Reid's evening visit to the Dean two cowboys from
the Diamond-and-a-Half outfit, on their way to Cherry Creek, stopped at
the ranch for dinner.

The well-known, open-handed Baldwin hospitality led many a passing rider
thus aside from the main valley road and through the long meadow lane to
the Cross-Triangle table. Always there was good food for man and horse,
with a bed for those who came late in the day; and always there was a
hearty welcome and talk under the walnut trees with the Dean. And in all
that broad land there was scarce a cowboy who, when riding the range,
would not look out for the Dean's cattle with almost the same interest
and care that he gave to the animals bearing the brand of his own
employer.

So it was that these riders from the Tonto Flats country told the Dean
that in looking over the Cross-Triangle cattle watering at Toohey they
had seen several cases of screwworms.

"We doped a couple of the worst, and branded a calf for you," said
"Shorty" Myers.

And his companion, Bert Wilson, added, as though apologizing, "We
couldn't stop any longer because we got to make it over to Wheeler's
before mornin'."

"Much obliged, boys," returned the Dean. Then, with his ever-ready jest,
"Sure you put the right brand on that calf?"

"We-all ain't ridin' for no Tailholt Mountain outfit this season,"
retorted Bert dryly, as they all laughed at the Dean's question.

And at the cowboy's words Patches, wondering, saw the laughing faces
change and looks of grim significance flash from man to man.

"Anybody seen anything over your way lately?" asked the Dean quietly.

In the moment of silence that followed the visitors looked questioningly
from the face of Patches to the Dean and then to Phil. Phil smiled his
endorsement of the stranger, and "Shorty" said, "We found a couple of
fresh-branded calves what didn't seem to have no mothers last week, and
Bud Stillwell says some things look kind o' funny over in the D.1
neighborhood."

Another significant silence followed. To Patches, it seemed as the
brooding hush that often precedes a storm. He had not missed those
questioning looks of the visitors, and had seen Phil's smiling
endorsement, but he could not, of course, understand. He could only
wonder and wait, for he felt intuitively that he must not speak. It was
as though these strong men who had received him so generously into
their lives put him, now, outside their circle, while they considered
business of grave moment to themselves.

"Well, boys," said the Dean, as if to dismiss the subject, "I've been in
this cow business a good many years, now, an' I've seen all kinds of men
come an' go, but I ain't never seen the man yet that could get ahead
very far without payin' for what he got. Some time, one way or another,
whether he's so minded or not, a man's just naturally got to pay."

"That law is not peculiar to the cattle business, either, is it, Mr.
Baldwin?" The words came from Patches, and as they saw his face, it was
their turn to wonder.

The Dean looked straight into the dark eyes that were so filled with
painful memories, and wistful desire. "Sir?"

"I mean," said Patches, embarrassed, as though he had spoken
involuntarily, "that what you say applies to those who live idly--doing
no useful work whatever--as well as to those who are dishonest in
business of any kind, or who deliberately steal outright. Don't you
think so?"

The Dean--his eyes still fixed on the face of the new man--answered
slowly, "I reckon that's so, Patches. When you come to think about it,
it _must_ be so. One way or another every man that takes what he ain't
earned has to pay for it."

"Who is he?" asked the visitors of Curly and Bob, as they went for their
horses, when the meal was over.

The Cross-Triangle men shook their heads.

"Just blew in one day, and the Dean hired him," said Bob.

"But he's the handiest man with his fists that's ever been in this neck
of the woods. If you don't believe it, just you start something," added
Curly with enthusiasm.

"Found it out, did you?" laughed Bert.

"In something less than a minute," admitted Curly.

"Funny name!" mused "Shorty."

Bob grinned. "That's what Curly thought--at first."

"And then he took another think, huh?"

"Yep," agreed Curly, "he sure carries the proper credentials to make any
name that he wants to wear good enough for me."

The visitors mounted their horses, and sat looking appraisingly at the
tall figure of Honorable Patches, as that gentleman passed them at a
little distance, on his way to the barn.

"Mebby you're right," admitted "Shorty," "but he sure talks like a
schoolmarm, don't he?"

"He sure ain't no puncher," commented Bert.

"No, but I'm gamblin' that he's goin' to be," retorted Curly, ignoring
the reference to Patches' culture.

"Me, too," agreed Bob.

"Well, we'll all try him out this fall rodeo"; and "better not let him
drift far from the home ranch for a while," laughed the visitors. "So
long!" and they were away.

Before breakfast the next morning Phil said to Patches, "Catch up Snip,
and give him a feed of grain. You'll ride with me to-day."

At Patches' look of surprise he explained laughingly, "I'm going to give
my school a little vacation, and Uncle Will thinks it's time you were
out of the kindergarten."

Later, as they were crossing the big pasture toward the country that
lies to the south, the foreman volunteered the further information that
for the next few weeks they would ride the range.

"May I ask what for?" said Patches, encouraged by the cowboy's manner.

It was one of the man's peculiarities that he rarely entered into the
talk of his new friends when their work was the topic of conversation.
And he never asked questions except when alone with Phil or the Dean,
and then only when led on by them. It was not that he sought to hide his
ignorance, for he made no pretenses whatever, but his reticence seemed,
rather, the result of a curious feeling of shame that he had so little
in common with these men whose lives were so filled with useful labor.
And this, if he had known, was one of the things that made them like
him. Men who live in such close daily touch with the primitive realities
of life, and who thereby acquire a simple directness, with a certain
native modesty, have no place in their hearts for--to use their own
picturesque vernacular--a "four-flusher."

Phil tactfully did not even smile at the question, but answered in a
matter-of-fact tone. "To look out for screw-worms, brand a calf here
and there, keep the water holes open, and look out for the stock
generally."

"And you mean," questioned Patches doubtfully, "that _I_ am to ride with
you?"

"Sure. You see, Uncle Will thinks you are too good a man to waste on the
odd jobs around the place, and so I'm going to get you in shape for the
rodeo this fall."

The effect of his words was peculiar. A deep red colored Patches' face,
and his eyes shone with a glad light, as he faced his companion. "And
you--what do you think about it, Phil?" he demanded.

The cowboy laughed at the man's eagerness. "Me? Oh, I think just as I
have thought all the time--ever since you asked for a job that day in
the corral."

Patches drew a long breath, and, sitting very straight in the saddle,
looked away toward Granite Mountain; while Phil, watching him curiously,
felt something like kindly pity in his heart for this man who seemed to
hunger so for a man's work, and a place among men.

Just outside the Deep Wash gate of the big pasture, a few cattle were
grazing in the open flat. As the men rode toward them, Phil took down
his riata while Patches watched him questioningly.

"We may as well begin right here," said the cowboy. "Do you see anything
peculiar about anything in that bunch?"

Patches studied the cattle in vain.

"What about that calf yonder?" suggested Phil, leisurely opening the
loop of his rope. "I mean that six-months youngster with the white
face."

Still Patches hesitated.

Phil helped him again. "Look at his ears."

"They're not marked," exclaimed Patches.

"And what should they be marked?" asked the teacher.

"Under-bit right and a split left, if he belongs to the
Cross-Triangle," returned the pupil proudly, and in the same breath he
exclaimed, "He is not branded either."

Phil smiled approval. "That's right, and we'll just fix him now, before
somebody else beats us to him." He moved his horse slowly toward the
cattle as he spoke.

"But," exclaimed Patches, "how do you know that he belongs to the
Cross-Triangle?"

"He doesn't," returned Phil, laughing. "He belongs to me."

"But I don't see how you can tell."

"I know because I know the stock," Phil explained, "and because I happen
to remember that particular calf, in the rodeo last spring. He got away
from us, with his mother, in the cedars and brush over near the head of
Mint Wash. That's one of the things that you have to learn in this
business, you see. But, to be sure we're right, you watch him a minute,
and you'll see him go to a Five-Bar cow. The Five-Bar is my iron, you
know--I have a few head running with Uncle Will's."

Even as he spoke, the calf, frightened at their closer approach, ran to
a cow that was branded as Phil had said, and the cow, with unmistakable
maternal interest in her offspring, proved the ownership of the calf.

"You see?" said Phil. "We'll get that fellow now, because before the
next rodeo he'll be big enough to leave his mother, and then; if he
isn't branded, he'll be a maverick, and will belong to anybody that puts
an iron on him."

"But couldn't someone brand him now, with their brand, and drive him
away from his mother?" asked Patches.

"Such things have been known to happen, and that not a thousand miles
from here, either," returned Phil dryly. "But, really, you know, Mr.
Patches, it isn't done among the best people."

Patches laughed aloud at his companion's attempt at a simpering
affectation. Then he watched with admiration while the cowboy sent his
horse after the calf and, too quickly for an inexperienced eye to see
just how it was done, the deft riata stretched the animal by the heels.
With a short "hogging" rope, which he carried looped through a hole cut
in the edge of his chaps near the belt, Phil tied the feet of his
victim, before the animal had recovered from the shock of the fall; and
then, with Patches helping, proceeded to build a small fire of dry grass
and leaves and sticks from a near-by bush. From his saddle, Phil took a
small iron rod, flattened at one end, and only long enough to permit its
being held in the gloved hand when the flattened end was hot--a running
iron, he called it, and explained to his interested pupil, as he thrust
it into the fire, how some of the boys used an iron ring for range
branding.

"And is there no way to change or erase a brand?" asked Patches, while
the iron was heating.

"Sure there is," replied Phil. And sitting on his heels, cowboy fashion,
he marked on the ground with a stick.

"Look! This is the Cross-Triangle brand: [Illustration]; and this:
[Illustration], the Four-Bar-M, happens to be Nick Cambert's iron, over
at Tailholt Mountain. Now, can't you see how, supposing I were Nick, and
this calf were branded with the Cross-Triangle, I could work the iron
over into my brand?"

Patches nodded. "But is there no way to detect such a fraud?"

"It's a mighty hard thing to prove that an iron has bees worked over,"
Phil answered slowly. "About the only sure way is to catch the thief in
the act."

"But there are the earmarks," said Patches, a few moments later, when
Phil had released the branded and marked calf--"the earmarks and the
brand wouldn't agree."

"They would if I were Nick," said the cowboy. Then he added quickly, as
if regretting his remark, "Our earmark is an under-bit right and a split
left, you said. Well, the Four-Bar-M earmark is a crop and an under-bit
right and a swallow-fork left." With the point of his iron now he again
marked in the dirt. "Here's your Cross-Triangle: [Illustration]; and
here's your Pour-Bar-M: [Illustration]."

"And if a calf branded with a Tailholt iron were to be found following a
Cross-Triangle cow, then what?" came Patches' very natural question.

"Then," returned the foreman of the Cross-Triangle grimly, "there would
be a mighty good chance for trouble."

"But it seems to me," said Patches, as they rode on, "that it would be
easily possible for a man to brand another man's calf by mistake."

"A man always makes a mistake when he puts his iron on another man's
property," returned the cowboy shortly.

"But might it not be done innocently, just the same!" persisted Patches.

"Yes, it might," admitted Phil.

"Well, then, what would you do if you found a calf, that you knew
belonged to the Dean, branded with some other man's brand? I mean, how
would you proceed?"

"Oh, I see what you are driving at," said Phil in quite a different
tone. "If you ever run on to a case, the first thing for you to do is to
be dead sure that the misbranded calf belongs to one of our cows. Then,
if you are right, and it's not too far, drive the cow and calf into the
nearest corral and report it. If you can't get them to a corral without
too much trouble, just put the Cross-Triangle on the calf's ribs. When
he shows up in the next rodeo, with the right brand on his ribs, and
some other brand where the right brand ought to be--you'll take pains to
remember his natural markings, of course--you will explain the
circumstances, and the owner of the iron that was put on him by mistake
will be asked to vent his brand. A brand is vented by putting the same
brand on the animal's shoulder. Look! There's one now." He pointed to an
animal a short distance away. "See, that steer is branded
Diamond-and-a-Half on hip and shoulder, and Cross-Triangle on his ribs.
Well, when he was a yearling he belonged to the Diamond-and-a-Half
outfit. We picked him up in the rodeo, away over toward Mud Tanks. He
was running with our stock, and Stillwell didn't want to go to the
trouble of taking him home--about thirty miles it is--so he sold him to
Uncle Will, and vented his brand, as you see."

"I see," said Patches, "but that's different from finding a calf
misbranded."

"Sure. There was no question of ownership there," agreed Phil.

"But in the case of the calf," the cowboy's pupil persisted, "if it had
left its mother when the man owning the iron was asked to vent it, there
would be no way of proving the real ownership."

"Nothing but the word of the man who found the calf with its mother,
and, perhaps, the knowledge of the men who knew the stock."

"What I am getting at," smiled Patches, "is this: it would come down at
last to a question of men, wouldn't it?"

"That's where most things come to in, the end in this country, Patches.
But you're right. With owners like Uncle Will, and Jim Reid, and
Stillwell, and dozens of others; and with cowboys like Curly and Bob and
Bert and 'Shorty,' there would be no trouble at all about the matter."

"But with others," suggested Patches.

"Well," said Phil slowly, "there are men in this country, who, if they
refused to vent a brand under such circumstances, would be seeing
trouble, and mighty quick, too."

"There's another thing that we've got to watch out for, just now," Phil
continued, a few minutes later, "and that is, 'sleepers'. We'll
suppose," he explained, "that I want to build up my, bunch of Five-Bars,
and that I am not too particular about how I do it. Well, I run on to an
unbranded Pot-Hook-S calf that looks good to me, but I don't dare put my
iron on him because he's too young to leave his mother. If I let him go
until he is older, some of Jim Reid's riders will brand him, and, you
see, I never could work over the Pot-Hook-S iron into my Five-Bar. So I
earmark the calf with the owner's marks, and don't brand him at all.
Then he's a sleeper. If the Pot-Hook-S boys see him, they'll notice that
he's earmarked all right, and very likely they'll take it for granted
that he's branded, or, perhaps let him go anyway. Before the next rodeo
I run on to my sleeper again, and he's big enough now to take away from
the cow, so all I have to do is to change the earmarks and brand him
with my iron. Of course, I wouldn't get all my sleepers, but--the
percentage would be in my favor. If too many sleepers show up in the
rodeo, though, folks would get mighty suspicious that someone was too
handy with his knife. We got a lot of sleepers in the last rodeo," he
concluded quietly.

And Patches, remembering what Little Billy had said about Nick Cambert
and Yavapai Joe, and with the talk of the visiting cowboys still fresh
in his mind, realized that he was making progress in his education.

Riding leisurely, and turning frequently aside for a nearer view of the
cattle they sighted here and there, they reached Toohey a little before
noon. Here, in a rocky hollow of the hills, a small stream wells from
under the granite walls, only to lose itself a few hundred yards away in
the sands and gravel of the wash. But, short as its run in the daylight
is, the water never fails. And many cattle come from the open range that
lies on every side, to drink, and, in summer time, to spend the heat of
the day, standing in the cool, wet sands or lying in the shade of the
giant sycamores that line the bank opposite the bluff. There are corrals
near-by and a rude cook-shack under the wide-spreading branches of an
old walnut tree; and the ground of the flat open space, a little back
from the water, is beaten bare and hard by the thousands upon thousands
of cattle that have at many a past rodeo-time been gathered there.

The two men found, as the Diamond-and-a-Half riders had said, several
animals suffering from those pests of the Arizona ranges, the
screwworms. As Phil explained to Patches while they watered their
horses, the screwworm is the larva of a blowfly bred in sores on living
animals. The unhealed wounds of the branding iron made the calves by far
the most numerous among the sufferers, and were the afflicted animals
not treated the loss during the season would amount to considerable.

"Look here, Patches," said the cowboy, as his practiced eyes noted the
number needing attention. "I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll just run
this hospital bunch into the corral, and you can limber up that riata of
yours."

And so Patches learned not only the unpleasant work of cleaning the
worm-infested sores with chloroform, but received his first lesson in
the use of the cowboy's indispensable tool, the riata.

"What next?" asked Patches, as the last calf escaped through the gate
which he had just opened, and ran to find the waiting and anxious
mother.

Phil looked at his companion, and laughed. Honorable Patches showed the
effect of his strenuous and bungling efforts to learn the rudiments of
the apparently simple trick of roping a calf. His face was streaked with
sweat and dust, his hair disheveled, and his clothing soiled and
stained. But his eyes were bright, and his bearing eager and ready.

"What's the matter?" he demanded, grinning happily at his teacher. "What
fool thing have I done now?"

"You're doing fine," Phil returned. "I was only thinking that you don't
look much like the man I met up on the Divide that evening."

"I don't feel much like him, either, as far as that goes," returned
Patches.

Phil glanced up at the sun. "What do you say to dinner? It must be about
that time."

"Dinner?"

"Sure. I brought some jerky--there on my saddle--and some coffee. There
ought to be an old pot in the shack yonder. Some of the boys don't
bother, but I never like to miss a feed unless it's necessary." He did
not explain that the dinner was really a thoughtful concession to his
companion.

"Ugh!" ejaculated Patches, with a shrug of disgust, the work they had
been doing still fresh in his mind. "I couldn't eat a bite."

"You think that now," retorted Phil, "but you just go down to the creek,
drink all you can hold, wash up, and see how quick you'll change your
mind when you smell the coffee."

And thus Patches received yet another lesson--a lesson in the art of
forgetting promptly the most disagreeable features of his work--an art
very necessary to those who aspire to master real work of any sort
whatever.

When they had finished their simple meal, and lay stretched full length
beneath the overhanging limbs of the age-old tree that had witnessed so
many stirring scenes, and listened to so many camp-fire tales of ranch
and range, they talked of things other than their work. In low tones, as
men who feel a mystic and not-to-be-explained bond of fellowship--with
half-closed eyes looking out into the untamed world that lay before
them--they spoke of life, of its mystery and meaning. And Phil, usually
so silent when any conversation touched himself, and so timid always in
expressing his own self thoughts, was strangely moved to permit this man
to look upon the carefully hidden and deeper things of his life. But
upon his cherished dream--upon his great ambition--he kept the door fast
closed. The time for that revelation of himself was not yet.

"By the way, Phil," said Patches, when at last his companion signified
that it was time for them to go. "Where were you educated? I don't think
that I have heard you say."

"I have no education," returned the young man, with a laugh that, to
Patches, sounded a bitter note. "I'm just a common cow-puncher, that's
all."

"I beg your pardon," ret

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