ame within their field of vision, and with the
gift of silence, which is rare.

If you know anything at all about cattlemen, you will know that the
Quirt was a poor man's ranch, when I tell you that Hunter and Johnson
milked three cows and made butter, fed a few pigs on the skim milk and
the alfalfa stalks which the saddle horses and the cows disdained to
eat, kept a flock of chickens, and sold what butter, eggs and pork they
did not need for themselves. Cattlemen seldom do that. More often they
buy milk in small tin cans, butter in "squares," and do without eggs.

Four of a kind were the men of the TJ up-and-down, and even Bill
Warfield--president and general manager of the Sawtooth Cattle Company,
and of the Federal Reclamation Company and several other companies,
State senator and general benefactor of the Sawtooth country--even the
great Bill Warfield lifted his hat to the owners of the Quirt when he
met them, and spoke of them as "the finest specimens of our old,
fast-vanishing type of range men." Senator Warfield himself represented
the modern type of range man and was proud of his progressiveness. Never
a scheme for the country's development was hatched but you would find
Senator Warfield closely allied with it, his voice the deciding one when
policies and progress were being discussed.

As to the Sawtooth, forty thousand acres comprised their holdings under
patents, deeds and long-time leases from the government. Another twenty
thousand acres they had access to through the grace of the owners, and
there was forest-reserve grazing besides, which the Sawtooth could have
if it chose to pay the nominal rental sum. The Quirt ranch was almost
surrounded by Sawtooth land of one sort or another, though there was
scant grazing in the early spring on the sagebrush wilderness to the
south. This needed Quirt Creek for accessible water, and Quirt Creek,
save where it ran through cut-bank hills, was fenced within the section
and a half of the TJ up-and-down.

So there they were, small fish making shift to live precariously with
other small fish in a pool where big fish swam lazily. If one small fish
now and then disappeared with mysterious abruptness, the other small
fish would perhaps scurry here and there for a time, but few would leave
the pool for the safe shallows beyond.

This is a tale of the little fishes.

CHAPTER TWO

THE ENCHANTMENT OF LONG DISTANCE

Lorraine Hunter always maintained that she was a