ou've met the old wretch and know what
he's like on the outside," she explained. "Hargus was in the cattle
business in a hand-to-mouth way when we came here, and he raised a
bigger noise than anybody else about our fences, claiming we'd cut him
off from water, which wasn't true. We didn't cut anybody off from the
river.

"Hargus is married to an Indian squaw, a little old squat, black-faced
thing as mean as a snake. They've got a big brood of children, that boy
you saw this morning is the senior of the gang. Old Hargus usually
harbors two or three cattle thieves, horse thieves or other crooks of
that kind, some of them just out of the pen, some preparing their way to
it. He does a sort of general rustling business, with this ranch as his
main source of supply. We've had a standing fight on with him ever since
we came here, but today was the first time, as I told you, that he ever
was caught.

"You heard what he said about cutting the fence this morning. That's the
attitude of the country all around. You couldn't convict a man for
cutting a fence in this country. So all a person can do is shoot them if
you catch them at it. I don't know what Hargus will do to get even with
this morning's humiliation."

"I think he'll leave that fence alone like it was charged with
lightnin'," Taterleg said.

"He'll try to turn something; he's wily and vindictive."

"He needs a chunk of lead about the middle of his appetite," Taterleg
declared.

"Who comes next?" Lambert inquired.

"There's a man they call Walleye Bostian--his regular name is Jesse--on
the farther end of this place that's troubled with a case of incurable
resentment against a barbed-wire fence. He's a sheepman, one of the
last that would do a lawless deed, you'd think, from the look of him,
but he's mean to the roots of his hair."

"All sheepmen's onery, ma'am, they tell me," said Taterleg, a cowman now
from core to rind, and loyal to his calling accordingly.

"I don't know about the rest of them, but Walleye Bostian is a mighty
mean sheepman. Well, I know I got a shot at him once that he'll
remember."

"_You_ did?" Taterleg's face was as bright as a dishpan with admiration.
He chuckled in his throat, eying the Duke slantingly to see how he took
that piece of news.

The Duke sat up a little stiffer, his face grew a shade more serious,
and that was all the change in him that Taterleg could see.

"I hope we can take that kind of work off your hands in the fu