and to work, a cattleman would tell you. Yet the TJ
up-and-down herd never seemed to increase beyond a niggardly three
hundred or so, though the Quirt ranch was older than its lordly
neighbours, the Sawtooth Cattle Company, who numbered their cattle by
tens of thousands and whose riders must have strings of fifteen horses
apiece to keep them going; older too than many a modest ranch that had
flourished awhile and had finished as line-camps of the Sawtooth when
the Sawtooth bought ranch and brand for a lump sum that looked big to
the rancher, who immediately departed to make himself a new home
elsewhere: older than others which had somehow gone to pieces when the
rancher died or went to the penitentiary under the stigma of a long
sentence as a cattle thief. There were many such, for the Sawtooth,
powerful and stern against outlawry, tolerated no pilfering from their
thousands.

The less you have, the more careful you are of your possessions.
Hunter and Johnson owned exactly a section and a half of land, and for
a mile and a half Quirt Creek was fenced upon either side. They hired
two men, cut what hay they could from a field which they irrigated, fed
their cattle through the cold weather, watched them zealously through
the summer, and managed to ship enough beef each fall to pay their
grocery bill and their men's wages and have a balance sufficient to buy
what clothes they needed, and perhaps pay a doctor if one of them fell
ill. Which frequently happened, since Brit was becoming a prey to
rheumatism that sometimes kept him in bed, and Frank occasionally
indulged himself in a gallon or so of bad whisky and suffered
afterwards from a badly deranged digestion.

Their house was a two-room log cabin, built when logs were easier to
get than lumber. That the cabin contained two rooms was the result of
circumstances rather than design. Brit had hauled from the
mountain-side logs long and logs short, and it had seemed a shame to
cut the long ones any shorter. Later, when the outside world had crept
a little closer to their wilderness--as, go where you will, the outside
world has a way of doing--he had built a lean-to shed against the cabin
from what lumber there was left after building a cowshed against the
log-barn.

In the early days, Brit had had a wife and two children, but the wife
could not endure the loneliness of the ranch nor the inconvenience of
living in a two-room log cabin. She was continually worrying ov