-puncher and seldom tampered with even by Bud's most
vindictive enemies. And he had enemies and many friends.

Meanwhile he had taken on weight until, as one of his friends remarked,
"Most any hoss but a Percheron draft would shy the minute Bud tried to
put his foot in the stirrup."

And when Bud came to that point in his career when he summed up his past
and found that his chief asset was experience, garnished with a somewhat
worn outfit of pack-saddles, tarps, bridles, chaps, and guns, he sighed
heavily.

The old trails were changing to roads. The local freight intermittently
disgorged tons of harvesting machinery. The sound of the Klaxton was
heard in the land. Despite the times and the manners, Bud's girth
increased insidiously. His hard-riding days were past. Progress marched
steadily onward, leaving an after-guard of homesteaders intrenched
behind miles of barbed-wire fence and mazes of irrigating-ditches. The
once open range was now a chessboard of agricultural endeavor, with the
pawns steadying ploughshares as they crept from square to square until
the opposing cattle king suffered ignominious checkmate, his prerogative
of free movement gone, his army scattered, his castles taken, and his
glory surviving only in the annals of the game.

Incidentally, Bud Shoop had saved a little money, and his large
popularity would have won for him a political sinecure; but he disliked
politics quite as heartily as he detested indolence. He needed work not
half so much as he wanted it.

He had failed as a rancher, but he still held his homestead on the Blue
Mesa, some twenty miles from the town of Jason, an old Mormon settlement
in the heart of the mesa country.

Friday morning at sunup Bud saddled his horse, closed the door of his
cabin on the Blue Mesa, and, whistling to his old Airedale, Bondsman,
rode across the mesa and down the mountain trail toward Jason. By
sundown that night he was in town, his horse fed, and he and Bondsman
sitting on the little hotel veranda, watching the villagers as they
passed in the dusk of early evening.

Coatless and perspiring, Bud betook himself next morning to the office
of the supervisor of that district of the Forest Service. Bondsman
accompanied him, stalking seriously at his master's heels. The
supervisor was busy. Bud filled a chair in the outer office, polished
his bald spot with a blue bandanna, and waited.

Presently the supervisor called him in. Bud rose heavily and plodded