w this as
well as we. They smell the mustangs, an' would break their necks to get
away. Satan and the sorrel were ten miles from camp when I found them
this mornin'. An' Jim's cayuse went farther, an' we never will get him.
He'll wear his hobbles out, then away with the wild horses. Once with
them, he'll never be caught again."

On the sixth day of our stay at Oak we had visitors, whom Frank
introduced as the Stewart brothers and Lawson, wild-horse wranglers.
They were still, dark men, whose facial expression seldom varied; tall
and lithe and wiry as the mustangs they rode. The Stewarts were on
their way to Kanab, Utah, to arrange for the sale of a drove of horses
they had captured and corraled in a narrow canyon back in the Siwash.
Lawson said he was at our service, and was promptly hired to look after
our horses.

"Any cougar signs back in the breaks?" asked Jones.

"Wal, there's a cougar on every deer trail," replied the elder Stewart,
"An' two for every pinto in the breaks. Old Tom himself downed fifteen
colts fer us this spring."

"Fifteen colts! That's wholesale murder. Why don't you kill the
butcher?"

"We've tried more'n onct. It's a turrible busted up country, them
brakes. No man knows it, an' the cougars do. Old Tom ranges all the
ridges and brakes, even up on the slopes of Buckskin; but he lives down
there in them holes, an' Lord knows, no dog I ever seen could follow
him. We tracked him in the snow, an' had dogs after him, but none could
stay with him, except two as never cum back. But we've nothin' agin Old
Tom like Jeff Clarke, a hoss rustler, who has a string of pintos
corraled north of us. Clarke swears he ain't raised a colt in two
years."

"We'll put that old cougar up a tree," exclaimed Jones.

"If you kill him we'll make you all a present of a mustang, an' Clarke,
he'll give you two each," replied Stewart. "We'd be gettin' rid of him
cheap."

"How many wild horses on the mountain now?"

"Hard to tell. Two or three thousand, mebbe. There's almost no ketchin'
them, an' they regrowin' all the time We ain't had no luck this spring.
The bunch in corral we got last year."

"Seen anythin' of the White Mustang?" inquired Frank. "Ever get a rope
near him?"

"No nearer'n we hev fer six years back. He can't be ketched. We seen
him an' his band of blacks a few days ago, headin' fer a water-hole
down where Nail Canyon runs into Kanab Canyon. He's so cunnin' he'll
never water at any of our trap cor