ependent effort is a failure. Steele was such a man, and that
made him bitter, but none the less energetic. He acted not only as
manager, but as foreman of the ranch, which included two sections,
twelve hundred and eighty acres. And he had many enemies.

Perhaps you have wondered at that queer audience in the barn, and why
threshing-time should bring it together. In those days in the West
threshing-time was an era of prosperity, and twenty-five or thirty men
would band together and buy a threshing-machine. They owned plenty of
horses, and they would go from ranch to ranch with this machine, and
thresh the grain. Now, this threshing-time being of short duration, it
drew into it men whose occupations were entirely different at other
times of the year. Hence, the bartenders, hold-up men, cowpunchers--whom
it would be fatal to ask where they came from--the blacksmiths, and the
store-keepers.

Gil Steele had been at the Bar O, so Whitey was known to him, and he
supposed that the boy had come merely to see the show. So Gil was rather
surprised, the next morning, when Whitey asked for a job for himself and
for Injun.

"What do you want to work for?" Steele demanded. "Your father's got
plenty o' money."

Whitey's real reason was that he wanted to be among the men to watch
Dorgan, but he equivocated--which is a pretty way of saying that he told
a white lie.

"Bill Jordan thinks I'm a softy," Whitey replied. "He's trying to make
it so hard for me that I'll be glad to go back to school. And I want to
show Bill that I'm not afraid of work." You see, there was enough truth
in this to keep Whitey's conscience from aching.

"All right," said Steele. "More hands mean quicker work and more money.
But I never heard of an Injun wanting to work before."

"Tame Injun," Injun said solemnly, which was as near a joke as he ever
came in the years Whitey knew him.

This work came under the head of what a fellow doesn't really have to
do, and everybody knows the difference between that and labor that a
fellow does have to do--about the same difference that there is between
work and fun. The threshing-machine was run by horse power. You remember
Felix, the jack that Whitey rode across the prairie, and Felix's job of
turning the little grinding-mill? The horses had the same sort of job,
except that there were teams of them, revolving around a central pivot,
that furnished the power that worked the great machine in whose maw
sheaves of whe