lertness,
thinking that an over bold "badman" might come suddenly to the end of
his depredations here. And yet no attack came, not so much as a
wandering yearling was lost to him.

Men of the stamp and calibre of these ranchers who were hearing of a
neighbour's losses only as a sort of prelude to their own, were not
patient men at the best, nor did such lives as they led permit of lax
hands and natures without initiative. It was in no way a surprise to
Thornton, upon riding to the Bar X, to learn that the cattle men were
now rising swiftly and actively to a defence of their own property. Many
of them lifted frank and angry voices in condemnation of their county
sheriff, many of them more generously admitted that Dalton was up
against a hard proposition and was doing all that any one man could do.
But they were unanimous in saying that what Cole Dalton couldn't do they
would do.

This morning Thornton found old man King saddling his horse in the Bar X
corrals and snapping out orders to his foreman and the two cowboys who
sat their horses watching him with speculative eyes. His recent loss had
driven him to a towering rage and his voice shook with anger in it.

"Twenty head they've took from me," he spat out angrily. "Twenty head
in one night an' they think they c'n git away with it an' go on doin'
jest what they damn please!" He jerked his cinch tight, climbed into his
saddle and as his young horse whirled about Thornton saw that he had a
rifle under his leg.

"Them cows," he went on wrathfully, merely ducking his head at the new
comer, "will average a hundred dollars a head. Two thousan' bucks gone
like a fog when the sun's up! What in hell do you fellers think I'm
payin' you for?"

"It ain't goin' to happen one more time," growled Bart Elliott, the
foreman whose wrath under the direct eyes of the "Old Man" was no less
than King's. "I jes' wish they'd try it on again...."

"Ain't goin' to happen again, ain't it?" retorted King. "That's got to
satisfy me, huh? Jest so long as they take a couple thousan' dollars
out'n my pockets, an' then don't come back for _all_ I got, it's all
right, huh? Now you boys can jest nacherally take the glue out'n your
ears an' listen a minute: I'm goin' to know who took them cows an' where
they went, an' I'm goin' to have 'em back, every little cow brute of
'em! Git me, Elliott? An' you, Jim an' Hodge? If you fellers are lookin'
for jobs where you ain't got nothin' to do you better lo