d."

"That was twenty years ago, Cal," Harris said. "But it still holds
good--only I've changed my mind too. You was dead right from the
first. Squatters will come to roost on every foot of ground and
there'll come a day when I'll have to turn squatter myself--so I might
as well start now. The way to get used to crowds, Cal, is to go where
the crowds are at. I'm headed back for Kansas and you better come
along. We'll get that partnership fixed up."

A single child had come to bless each union in the parents' late middle
age. The Harris heir, a boy of eight, had been named Calvin in honor
of his father's friend. Cal Warren had as nearly returned the
compliment as circumstances would permit, and his three-year-old
daughter bore the name of Williamette Ann for both father and mother of
the boy who was his namesake, and Warren styled her Billie for short.

Each man was as stubbornly set in his new views as he had been in the
old. The Harrises came into possession of the Warrens' prairie
schooner and drove off to the east. The Warrens took over the Three
Bar brand and the little Williamette Ann slept in the tiny bunk built
for the son of the Harris household.

For a space of minutes these old pictures occupied the mind of the man
on the pinto horse. The led buckskin moved fretfully and tugged on the
lead rope, rousing the man from his abstraction. Distant strings of
prairie schooners and ox-bows faded from his mind's eye and he way once
more conscious of the red steer with the Three Bar brand that had
stirred up the train of reflections. He turned for another glimpse of
the distant sign as he headed the paint-horse along the road.

"All that was quite a spell back, Calico," he said. "Old Bill Harris
planted the first one of those signs, and it served a good purpose
then. It's a sign that stands for lack of progress to-day. Times
change, and it's been eighteen years or so since old Bill Harris left."

The road traversed the bench, angled down a side hill to a valley
somewhat more than a mile across. Calico pricked his ears sharply
toward the Three Bar buildings that stood at the upper end of it.

Curious eyes peered from the bunk house as he neared it, for the
paint-horse and the buckskin were not without fame even if the man
himself were a stranger to them all. For the better part of a year the
two high-colored horses had been seen on the range,--south to the
railroad, west to the Idaho line. The ma