ed with gusto a breath of the warming, pine-spiced air.

"It's sunning up, Ben." Ben grunted unamiably.

A little distance ahead of them a doe and a half-grown fawn bounded
across the road.

"She seemed to be in a hurry," Ewing again ventured.

"She wanted t' git that child away from here, 'fore some one stuffed
its head full o' fool talk about goin' off to New York. Can't tell what
notions a young deer _might_ git." With this laborious surmise he shut
his jaws together with repellent grimness.

Their road now wound down a hill and out of the woods to join the valley
road.

"Yender's Beulah Pierce!" Ben snapped this out savagely. The wagon was
half a mile ahead. Pierce was driving, and in the rear seat were two
figures whom they knew to be Mrs. Laithe and her brother. As Ben had
pointedly ignored these Ewing did not refer to them.

They came to a gate in a wire fence that stretched interminably away on
either side, over brown, low-rolling hills. Pierce had left the gate
open for them, and Ewing got out to close it after they had passed
through.

"Larabie is building a lot of fence," he said, as they drove on. "At
this rate he'll have every school section in Hinsdale County wired in
pretty soon."

On this impersonal ground Ben seemed willing to meet him.

"Me? Know what I'm going to do if Wes' Larabie cuts off any more o' this
road with his barb wire? Stick a pair o' wire clippers in the whip
socket an' drive through. _That's_ all! You'd think he owned all
America, the way he makes people sidle along that fence till he gits
good an' ready to make a gate. Me? Make my own gates. Yes, sir! Wire
clippers!"

With this he was sufficiently cheered to insult vivaciously a couple of
dull, incurious Mexicans whom they presently passed, plodding behind a
laden burro train. To his opprobrious burst of weirdly entangled
Spanish and English he added the taunting bleat of a sheep and a
merrily malign gesture eloquent of throats to be slit--the throats of
unspeakable sheep herders. He observed with deep disgust that neither of
the threatened ones gave any sign of interest in their portended fate.
They passed with scarce a lift of their heads.

"They're takin' supplies up to that sheep outfit o' Rankin's," grumbled
Ben. "Pierce an' some o' the others is talkin' about gettin' in a car
load o' saltpeter an' dopin' the range if Rankin lets his herd work down
any closeter--have it billed in as hardware or pianos, an' unload th