wenty-five dollars a month. He worked four months, and
it was hard work, took his pay check in and handed it to Tenison. That
was strangely enough the beginning of a friendship that was never
broken. Tenison tried to give the check back to Laramie. He could
not. But Laramie never again tried to clean out the bank at Tenison's.

The Laramie cabin on Turkey Creek--the son built afterward on the same
spot--stood on a slight conical rise some distance back from the little
stream that watered the ranch. From his windows Jim Laramie could look
on gently falling ground in all directions. Toward the creek lay an
alfalfa field which, with a crude irrigating ditch and water from the
creek, he had brought to a prosperous stand. Below the alfalfa stood
the barn and the corral.

The day after Kate Doubleday's adventure with him at the Junction,
Laramie was riding up the creek to his cabin when a man standing at the
corral gate hailed him. It wag Ben Simeral. Ben, old and ragged, met
every man with a smile--a bearded, seamed and shabby smile, but an
honest smile. Ben was a derelict of the range, a stray whose appeal
could be only to patient men. Whenever he wandered into the Falling
Wall country, where he had a claim, he made Laramie's cabin a sort of
headquarters and spent weeks at a time there, looking after the stock
in return for what John Lefever termed the "court'sies" of the ranch.

Laramie, greeting Ben, made casual inquiry about the stock. Ben looked
at him as if expectant; but Ben was not aggressive for news or anything
else. He grinned as he looked Laramie over: "Well, you're back again,
Jim."

Laramie responded in kindly fashion: "Anybody been here?"

"Nary critter," declared the custodian, "'cept Abe Hawk--he came over
to borry your Marlin rifle."

"What did he want with that?"

"Said he was going up into the mountains but he's comin' over again
before he starts. I knowed he helped you track them wire scouts over
to Barb's. The blame critters tore off all the wire t'other side the
creek, too. Get any track of 'em?" he asked, sympathetically alive to
what had been most on Laramie's mind when he had started from home.

Laramie barely hesitated but he looked squarely at Ben and answered in
even tones: "No track, Ben."

Ben looked at him, still smiling with a kindly hope:

"Hear from the contest on the creek quarter?"

"They told me at Medicine Bend it had gone against me."

"Psho! Never! Y