t to be good to 'em there's your chanst. Meanwhile,
I'm only a cow-punch pullin' off a round-up, and your name is
Mr.--you're the superintendent of the Dos S. Your job is to protect
the upper range, and I begin to think you can do it."

There was a tone of half-hearted enthusiasm about this talk which
marked it for a prepared "spiel," laboriously devised to speed the new
superintendent upon his way; but, not being schooled in social deceit,
Creede failed utterly in making it convincing.

"That's good," said Hardy, "but tell me--what has been your custom in
the past? Haven't you been in the habit of feeding them when they came
in?"

"Feed 'em?" cried Creede, flaring up suddenly. "Did I feed 'em? Well,
I should guess yes--I never turned one away hungry in my life. W'y,
hell, man," he exclaimed, his anger growing on him, "I slep' in the
same blanket with 'em--until I become lousy," he added grimly.

"What!" exclaimed Hardy, aghast. "You don't mean to say--"

"No," interrupted Creede ironically, "I don't mean to say anythin'--not
from now on. But while we're on the subject and to avoid any future
misunderstandin' I might just as well tell you right now that I
can't see nothin' good in a sheepman--_nothin'!_ I'm like my cat Tom
when he sees a rattlesnake, my hair bushes up clean over my ears and
I see hell, damnation, and sudden death!"

He rose up, frowning, on his mighty horse and gazed at Hardy with eyes
that burned deep with passion. "If every sheep and sheepman in Arizona
should drop dead at this minute," he said, "it would simply give me a
laughin' sensation. God damn 'em!" he added passionately, and it
sounded like a prayer.

Half an hour later as they passed through the gloomy silence of the
box canyon, picking their way over rocks and bowlders and driftwood
cast forty feet above the river level in some terrific glut of waters,
he began to talk again, evenly and quietly, pointing out indifferent
things along the trail, and when at last they mounted the hill and
looked down upon Hidden Water his anger was forgotten.

"Well," he remarked, throwing out a hand, "there's home--how do you
like it?"

Hardy paused and looked it over critically--a broad V-shaped valley
half a mile in length, beginning at the mouth of a great dry wash and
spreading out through trees and hummocks down to the river. A broken
row of cottonwoods and sycamores stretched along the farther side,
following the broad, twisting bed of the san