NE-WAY TRAIL

CHAPTER I

A GENTLEMAN RANKER

Dan McLagan shifted his cigar, and his face lit with a grin of
satisfaction.

"Seventy-five per cent. of calves," he murmured, glancing out at the
sunlit yards. "Say, it's been an elegant round-up." Then his
enthusiasm rose and found expression. "It's the finest, luckiest ranch
in Montana--in the country. Guess I'd be within my rights if I said
'in the world.' I can't say more."

"No."

The quiet monosyllable brought the rancher down to earth. He looked
round at his companion with an inquiring glance.

"Eh?"

But Jim Thorpe had no further comment to offer.

The two were sitting in the foreman's cabin, a small but roughly
comfortable split-log hut, where elegance and tidiness had place only
in the more delicate moments of its occupant's retrospective
imagination. Its furnishing belonged to the fashion of the prevailing
industry, and had in its manufacture the utilitarian methods of the
Western plains, rather than the more skilled workmanship of the
furniture used in civilization. Thus, the bed was a stretcher
supported on two packing-cases, the table had four solid legs that had
once formed the sides of a third packing-case, while the cupboard,
full of cattle medicines, was the reconstructed portions of a fourth
packing-case.

The collected art on the walls consisted of two rareties. One was a
torn print of a woman's figure, classically indecent with regard to
apparel; and the other was a fly-disfigured portrait of a sweet-faced
old lady, whose refinement and dignity of expression suggested
surroundings of a far more delicate nature than those in which she now
found herself. Besides these, a brace of ivory-butted revolvers served
to ornament the wall at the head of the bed. And a stack of five or
six repeating rifles littered an adjacent corner.

It was a man's abode, and the very simplicity of it, the lack of cheap
ornamentation, the carelessness of self in it, suggested a great deal
of the occupant's character. Jim Thorpe cared as little for creature
comforts as only a healthy-minded, healthy-bodied man, who has tasted
of the best and passed the dish--or has had it snatched from him--will
sometimes care. His thoughts were of the moment. He dared not look
behind him; and ahead?--well, as yet, he had no desire to think too
far ahead.

The ranch owner was sitting on the side of the stretcher, and Jim
Thorpe, his foreman, stood leaning against the table. McLa