from first to last."

"I've got about all I need," the sheriff said. "A dozen or so. Mostly
old friends of yours. I've picked 'em up on and off in the last two
weeks. They're strong for upholding the last letter of the law--just
like you said."

"A dozen?" Carson asked. "How'll you raise the money to pay that many
at once?"

"I'm sort of expecting maybe the Three Bar will make up the deficit,"
Alden said. "It's cheaper than paying rewards. That's another reason
I don't think Cal had a hand in this blacklist report."

The storekeeper grinned.

"Surely not. Surely not. I'd never suspect him of that," he said.
"But all the same it's working just as well as if he really had."

XIII

The first warm days of spring had drawn the frost from the ground.
Billie rode beside Harris down the lane to the lower field. A tiny
cabin stood completed on every filing. Two men were digging post holes
across the valley below the edge of the last fall's plowing and the
mule teams were steadily breaking out another strip.

"Almost a year," she said, referring to the commencement of the new
work.

"Just a year to-day," Harris corrected, and he was thinking of the day
he had first met the Three Bar girl. "This is our anniversary, sort
of."

She nodded as she caught his meaning.

"The anniversary of our partnership," she said. "You're good on dates.
We've pulled together pretty well, considering our start."

"It was a rocky trail for the first few days," he confessed. "But all
the time I was hoping it would get smoothed out."

"You told me there were millions of miles of sage just outside," she
recollected. "And millions of cows--and girls."

"Later I told you something else," he said. "And I've been meaning it
ever since. The road to the outside is closed. If I was to start now
I'd lose the way."

She pointed down the valley as a drove of horses moved toward them
under the guidance of a dozen men. The hands would start breaking out
the remuda the following day. The spring work was on.

"Off to a running start on another year," he said. "And sure to hold
our lead." They drew aside as the remuda thundered past and on toward
the corrals. "From to-day on out, you and I'll be a busy pair," he
prophesied.

His prediction proved true. The Three Bar was a beehive of activity
and it seemed that the hours between dawn and dark were all too short
for the amount of work Harris wished to crowd into them.