m.

"Of course you know I'm sorry for a number of things I've said to you,"
she said. "But I want to thank you for being too decent to return them
in kind. You're real folks, Cal."

"Good girl, Billie," he thanked her. "As to what you said, it's
remarkable that you didn't say more. I knew you weren't crabbing over
what you might lose for yourself but over the thought that your father
had been tricked. I tried to put myself in your place and if I'd been
you I know I'd have kicked me off the place, or told Waddles to turn
loose his wolf."

He switched abruptly away from the topic in hand and reverted to the
subject they had discussed an hour past.

"We've a clear field now with nothing on our minds but the job of
putting the Three Bar on its feet," he said. "The Three Bar is a
pretty small outfit the way things are to-day but in a few more years
the brand that runs three thousand head will be almost in the class of
cattle kings. The range will be settled with an outfit roosting on
every available site. The big fellows will find their range cut up and
then they're through. If the Three Bar files on all the water out of
Crazy Loop and covers the flat with hay we'll control all the range for
a number of miles each way. There's not another site short of
Brandon's place west of us--twelve miles or so; about the same to the
east; still farther off south of us. We'll be riding the crest."

"If we can only hold on against Slade," she agreed. "But can we?"

"Watch us!" he said. "The Brandons would file on their home basin and
put the V L bottoms in hay to-morrow if they could. McVey's been
wanting to do it on the Halfmoon D ever since he bought out the brand
five years back. They're all afraid to start. But they'll be for
us--and follow us as soon as we show them it can be done. Art Brandon
is repping with us and I've been sounding him out. You talk to him.
In the meantime you try and get a letter off to the Judge to-day."

The girl nodded.

"We'll try it," she said. "I know that Cal Warren would rather see the
Three Bar go to pieces from its own pressure, fighting from the inside
to grow, than to see it whittled down from the outside without our
fighting back."

She crossed to her teepee to write the letter asking Judge Colton's
advice on this matter which would mean the turning point in Three Bar
affairs. An hour later a man rode away from the wagon, his bed roll
packed on a led horse, heading for