hitey asked. "Maybe we can ride night herd.
It'll be great fun."

Riding night herd was not Injun's idea of fun, but he was so glad to be
with Whitey again that he made no objection. He seldom made objections,
anyway. It occurred to neither of the boys that after Injun's long
pursuit of the horse-thief, it would be a hardship for him to ride all
that day and possibly that night. And, of course, Injun wasn't hungry.
He had not been fool enough to start out on a long chase without
providing himself with food.

So the boys rode on. Even had they known into what they were riding it
is unlikely that they would have turned back. Had Walt Lampson known of
the coming peril he would not have been at the Star Circle, laughingly
telling his men of sending Whitey on a wild-goose chase, that would end
with his spending a night in the saddle, facing a blinding storm.
Lampson and all the men he could summon would have been heavily armed,
dashing at full speed toward the threatened herd.

Buck Milton, the range boss, made a better impression on Whitey than any
other man he had seen at the Star Circle. He was tall, blond, sinewy. He
was thoughtful and serious, and not ill-natured. He looked like a man
who could take a joke which he might not understand any too well, and
put up a fight in which he would prove a deadly factor. In short, he
was a character you would look at twice, and Whitey was surprised to
find him in the Star Circle outfit.

Hank Dawes handed Buck a letter, which Whitey took to be instructions
from Walt Lampson, and Buck read it, talked to Hank a moment, and when
Buck rode over to where Whitey waited with Injun, he was smiling.

"There won't be no cuttin' out t'day," he said. "Too late, for one
thing, and for another it's goin' t' storm. You boys like t' stay with
th' herd t'night? Be kinda rough."

"Why, yes. We'd like it immensely. It'll be a sort of adventure," Whitey
replied.

"Well, some folks might call it that," said Buck. "You might stick along
with me." And he and the boys rode off together.

You must know of the old, old enmity that existed between the cowmen and
the sheepmen of those early days of the Western ranges. In the
neighborhood in which Whitey found himself, this enmity was particularly
bitter, for more and more had the sheep been encroaching on the plains
that the cattlemen regarded as their own. And the reason for this
enmity: once the white-coated flocks had passed over the land it was
d