g the beef-gathering season,
Bold Richard Larkin bantered the one who had left the cattle for a
poker game, pitting the line-back three-year-old against a white poker
cow then in the Pool pasture and belonging to the man from Black Bear.
It was a short but spirited game. At its end the bar-circle-bar steer
went home with Reece's man. There was a protective code of honor among
rustlers, and Larkin gave the new owner the history of the steer.
He told him that the brand was of record in McMullen County, Texas,
warned him of special inspectors, and gave him other necessary
information.

The men from the Coldwater Pool, who went on the eastern division of
the round-up next spring, came back and reported having seen a certain
line-back poker steer, but the bar-circle-bar had somehow changed,
until now it was known as the _pilot wheel_. And, so report came back,
in the three weeks' work that spring, the line-back pilot-wheel steer
had changed owners no less than five times. Late that fall word came
down from Fant's pasture up west on the Salt Fork to send a man or two
up there, as Coldwater Pool cattle had been seen on that range. Larkin
and another lad went up to a beef round-up, and almost the first steer
Bold Richard laid his eyes on was an under-bit, line-back, once a
bar-circle-bar but now a pilot-wheel beef. Larkin swore by all the
saints he would know that steer in Hades. Then Abner Taylor called
Bold Richard aside and told him that he had won the steer about a week
before from an Eagle Chief man, who had also won the beef from another
man east on Black Bear during the spring round-up. The explanation
satisfied Larkin, who recognized the existing code among rustlers.

The next spring the line-back steer was a five-year-old. Three winters
in that northern climate had put the finishing touches on him. He was
a beauty. But Abner Taylor knew he dared not ship him to a market, for
there he would have to run a regular gauntlet of inspectors. There was
another chance open, however. Fant, Taylor's employer, had many Indian
contracts. One contract in particular required three thousand northern
wintered cattle for the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeast
Montana. Fant had wintered the cattle with which to fill this contract
on his Salt Fork range in the Cherokee Strip. When the cowman cast
about for a foreman on starting the herd for Fort Peck, the fact that
Abner Taylor was a Texan was sufficient recommendation with Fant.