ourt--Menocal owns everything and everybody around here. So I'm
quitting."

"The sheep business isn't all roses, that's certain," Lee Bryant
remarked. "It's hard luck that your band ran down just when the price
of mutton and wool is going up. So you're letting the ranch slide?"

"Yes, I can't pay the mortgage; Menocal would foreclose at once if I
tried to stay. Last time I was in town he asked me about paying it off
and when I told him I shouldn't be able to do that, he said he'd have
me deed it back to him to save foreclosure proceedings. And he was
smiling, too. He knew all the time that he'd get the ranch back; and
when he does, he'll sell it to some other sucker."

"Both of us have wished a hundred times that we'd never sold our
Illinois farm to come here," Mrs. Stevenson said, plaintively. "I
don't know what we'll do when we go back, for that matter. Just rent a
place, I guess. Land is so high-priced there that we'll never be able
to buy a farm again."

"Renting there is better than starving here," her husband declared.
"We'll have a better home, too. When we first came to this place, we
planned on building a fine house, but I never had the money loose, and
we've just kept on from year to year living in this 'dobe hole. Good
thing I didn't have the money, however, for we'd lose the house along
with the ranch if we had built. Well, we're going back East, anyhow,
as soon as I sell the sheep. Graham, who has the big ranch on Diamond
Creek, south of where those girls are homesteading, is coming up in a
day or two to look at them, maybe buy them. You can see Graham's big
white house from the Kennard trail."

Bryant nodded. "I know the place, saw it when passing," said he. Then
he went on, "When I was at the ford watering my horse before coming
here, an auto crossed the creek. In the rear seat were a fat Mexican,
whom I took to be Menocal, and a white man with a pointed beard. The
latter perhaps was Graham?"

"Yes, that must have been him. Which way were they driving?"

"South."

"Going to the Graham ranch, I s'pose."

"There was a slim young fellow driving the car--some Mexican blood in
him," Lee stated.

"Menocal's son, Charlie, a half-breed snippet who puts on airs because
his father's rich," Stevenson said, in a disgusted tone. "A white
woman married Menocal, you know."

"In the front seat with the young fellow was a girl, rather pretty,"
Bryant appended.

"That's Louise, I imagine," Mrs. Stevenson sa