ediately forthcoming from the rancher; he sat
staring absently at the backs of his roughened hands, now and again
rubbing one or the other, and enveloped in a gloom that Bryant could
both see and feel. Then all at once Stevenson began to talk, in a
voice querulous and morose.

"We're going to quit here, sell the sheep, and go back East. I was
swindled when I bought this ranch, and I want to get away before I
lose my last cent. Came out to this country five years ago from
Illinois with forty thousand dollars, and now we're going back with
what I can sell my sheep for, maybe twenty-five hundred cash. Menocal
robbed me right at the start, selling me this place for twenty-five
thousand--twenty thousand down and a mortgage for the remaining five
thousand--when the place was just five thousand acres of sagebrush,
with no more water than runs in this creek. I was a tenderfoot all
right! The land agent at Kennard showed it to me in June when the
Perro was booming, and I believed him when he said it ran that way all
the year around. Look at it now! I didn't have sense enough to inquire
and learn about it, being in a hurry to get into the sheep business
and thinking I should be rich in no time. That agent sold it to me for
irrigated land, and a bargain at five dollars an acre. Menocal, who
owned it and deeded it to me, pretends he isn't responsible for what
the man said. Five dollars an acre! It's worth about fifty cents for
winter range, and no more."

"If it could be irrigated, it would be a bargain sure enough at five
dollars," Lee stated. "And there's another water right for the place
you said when I was here before."

"Yes, there is--on paper. Water was appropriated out of the Pinas
River, but that's eight miles north of here, and it would cost a
hundred thousand dollars, if not more, to build a dam and a canal
along the mountain side. No, sir; that appropriation was just some
more of Menocal's tricky work! He jammed it through the land office
thirty years ago and, they say, never did any more to comply with the
law requiring delivery of the water on this ground than to have a man
drive around pouring a bucketful out of a barrel upon each quarter
section."

"Some pretty shady transactions were put across in those early days,"
Bryant commented.

"Well, ain't matters just as bad now?" Stevenson asked, quickly. "He
still has the appropriation, or rather I'm supposed to have it with
this ranch. Because Menocal controls th