OYOTE 192

XVI. THE SAWTOOTH SHOWS ITS HAND 200

XVII. YACK DON'T LIE 216

XVIII. "I THINK AL WOODRUFF'S GOT HER" 233

XIX. SWAN CALLS FOR HELP 245

XX. KIDNAPPED 255

XXI. "OH, I COULD KILL YOU!" 264

XXII. "YACK, I LICK YOU GOOD IF YOU BARK" 277

XXIII. "I COULDA LOVED THIS LITTLE GIRL" 284

XXIV. ANOTHER STORY BEGINS 296

THE QUIRT

CHAPTER ONE

LITTLE FISH

Quirt Creek flowed sluggishly between willows which sagged none too
gracefully across its deeper pools, or languished beside the rocky
stretches that were bone dry from July to October, with a narrow channel
in the center where what water there was hurried along to the pools
below. For a mile or more, where the land lay fairly level in a
platter-like valley set in the lower hills, the mud that rimmed the
pools was scored deep with the tracks of the "TJ up-and-down" cattle, as
the double monogram of Hunter and Johnson was called.

A hard brand to work, a cattleman would tell you. Yet the TJ up-and-down
herd never seemed to increase beyond a niggardly three hundred or so,
though the Quirt ranch was older than its lordly neighbors, the Sawtooth
Cattle Company, who numbered their cattle by tens of thousands and
whose riders must have strings of fifteen horses apiece to keep them
going; older too than many a modest ranch that had flourished awhile and
had finished as line-camps of the Sawtooth when the Sawtooth bought
ranch and brand for a lump sum that looked big to the rancher, who
immediately departed to make himself a new home elsewhere: older than
others which had somehow gone to pieces when the rancher died or went to
the penitentiary under the stigma of a long sentence as a cattle thief.
There were many such, for the Sawtooth, powerful and stern against
outlawry, tolerated no pilfering from their thousands.

The less you have, the more careful you are of your possessions. Hunter
and Johnson owned exactly a section and a half of land, and for a mile
and a half Quirt Creek was fenced upon either side. They hired two men,
cut what hay they could from a field which they irrigated, fed their
cattle through the cold weather, watched them zealously through the
summer, and managed to ship enough beef each fall to pay their grocery
bill and their men's wages a