ger and shouted: "'I'll bet my outfit
against a pair of green socks either one of 'em or both will be back
here before this round-up is over."

"You will, eh?" snarled Buck. "Well, we're just waitin' for 'em.
We'll swing Payson so high he'll look like a buzzard, and as for
Hoover--well, he's served his last term as sheriff in this yere county,
you hear me shouting."

McKee cut his pony with his quirt and dashed away in time to escape an
unwelcome encounter with several members of the Sweetwater outfit who
were riding back to camp.

"S-t-a-y with him, Bud, s-t-a-y with him," shouted Parenthesis, as the
first of the cowboys pitched on a bucking horse past the chuck-wagon,
the rider using quirt and spurs until he got the bronco into a lope.
The other boys followed, each cayuse apparently inventing some new sort
of deviltry.

For two weeks before the round-up the outfit had been busting broncos
at the home ranch. Each morning at dawn they started, working until
the heat of the day forced them to rest. When the temperature crawls
to 104 in the shade, and the alkali-dust is so thick in the corral that
the hoofs raise a cloud in which horses can hide themselves twenty feet
away, when eyes smart and the tongue aches in the parched mouth, it
becomes almost impossible to handle yourself, let alone a kicking,
struggling bronco.

As one day is like another, and one horse differs from another only in
the order of his tricks to avoid the rope and the saddle, a glimpse of
the horsemanship of Bud Lane and his fellows will serve as a general
picture of life on any Western ranch.

The breaking of the ponies was the work of Bud Lane, who, through the
influence of Polly, had broken with McKee and returned to work on
Sweetwater Ranch in order to assist Echo, with whom he had become
reconciled on discovering that she had been loyal to his brother even
to the extent of sending her husband into the desert to bring Dick back.

Bud was the youngest of the hands, but a lad born to the saddle and
rope. "Weak head and strong back for a horse-fighter" is a proverb on
the plains, and Bud had certainly acted the part.

Fresno and Show Low, with four flankers, had driven into the corral a
half-dozen horses untouched by man's hands since the days of colthood.
A shout, a swing of a gate, and the beasts were huddled in the round
corral, trembling and snorting. This corral has a circular fence
slightly higher than a man's head with a snubb