men--and there were several now--and went
away to join his fellows, who had ridden on slowly till he might
overtake them. He found Happy Jack grumbling and predicting evil, as
it was his nature to do, but he merely straightened his aching back and
laughed at the prophecies.

"As I told you before, there's more than one way to kill a cat," he
asserted tritely but never the less impressively. "Nobody can say
we wasn't mild; and nobody can say we hadn't a right to get those
chickencoops off our land. If you ask me, Florence Grace will have to
go some now if she gets the best of the deal. She overlooked a bet.
We haven't been served with any contest notices yet, and so we ain't
obliged to take their say-so. Who's going to stand guard tonight? We've
got to stand our regular shifts, if we want to keep ahead of the game.
I'm willing to be It. I'd like to make sure they don't slip any stock
across before daylight."

"Say, it's lucky we've got a bunch of boneheads like them to handle,"
Pink observed thankfully. "Would a bunch of natives have stood around
like that with their hands in their pockets and let us get away with the
moving job? Not so you could notice!"

"What we'd better do," cut in the Native Son without any misleading
drawl, "is try and rustle enough money to build that fence."

"That's right," assented Cal. "Maybe the Old Man--"

"We don't go to the Old Man for so much as a bacon rind!" cried the
Native Son impatiently. "Get it into your systems, boys, that we've
got to ride away around the Flying U. We ought to be able to build that
fence, all right, without help from anybody. Till we do we've got to
hang and rattle, and keep that nester stock from getting past us. I'll
stand guard till midnight."

A little more talk, and some bickering with Slim and Happy Jack, the two
chronic kickers, served to knock together a fair working organization.
Weary and Andy Green were informally chosen joint leaders, because
Weary could be depended upon to furnish the mental ballast for Andy's
imagination. Patsy was told that he would have to cook for the outfit,
since he was too fat to ride. They suggested that he begin at, once, by
knocking together some sort of supper. Moving houses, they declared, was
work. They frankly hoped that they would not have to move many more--and
they were very positive that they would not be compelled to move the
same shack twice, at any rate.

"Say, we'll have quite a collection of shacks down