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Updated: June 8, 2025
Gabby's stenographic brevity made it difficult to extract details, but apparently the fellow had passed himself off as an old friend of Buck's from Texas, desirous of looking him up. He was a stranger to Gabby, slight, dark, with eyes set rather closely together, and he rode a Shoe-Bar horse.
"I'm not saying any one of 'em couldn't pick me off a dozen times a day and make an easy get-away across the border," he thought, stretching himself out on the husk mattress. "But Lynch don't want to have to make a get-away. There's something right here on the Shoe-Bar that interests him a whole lot too much."
"That would likely be a fake one," Stratton reminded him. "Maybe. Well, I'll make a few inquiries." He stood up stretching. "I'd like mighty well to start for the Shoe-Bar to-night, but I'm afraid I can't get a posse together soon enough. We'll need some bunch to round up that gang. You'll be at the United States Hotel, I suppose?
Buck straightened abruptly. "What!" he exclaimed. "You mean to say there's been rustling on the Shoe-Bar?" Again Jessup hesitated, but more briefly. "I don't know why I shouldn't tell yuh. Everybody's wise to it, or suspects somethin'. They've got away with quite a bunch mostly from the pastures around Las Vegas, over near the hills.
Stratton, it seems, had sold out because he didn't know what might happen to him across the water. Oh, Andrew J. was a right smooth talker, believe me, but still an' all he didn't make no great hit with folks around the country even after he settled down on the Shoe-Bar and brung his daughter there to live.
Do you suppose, if I put Tenny wise to what I was after, that he'd let me have a cayuse and pack-horse, and stake me to enough grub to keep me a week or two in the mountains back of the Shoe-Bar?" "He might, especially when he knows you're buckin' Tex; he never was much in love with Lynch." Jessup paused, eyeing his companion curiously.
His glance strayed to the brand on Buck's cayuse, and his swarthy face took on an expression of pleased surprise. "You come from Shoe-Bar?" he questioned. "You're some mind-reader," commented Stratton briefly. "What of it?" "Mebbe yo' do me favor," pursued the Mexican eagerly. "Save me plenty hot ride." He pulled an envelope from the pocket of his elaborately silver-conchoed chaps.
The thing had been so fiendishly cold-blooded and calculating that it made his blood boil, for it was perfectly evident now to Buck that he had thwarted a deliberate plot to introduce the blackleg scourge among the Shoe-Bar cattle.
What sort of a fellow is this Tenny, over at the Rocking-R?" "He's white," returned Bud promptly. "No squarer ranch-boss around the country. I'd of gone there instead of the Shoe-Bar, only they was full up. What was yuh thinkin' of bracin' him for a job?" "Not exactly, though I'd like Lynch to think I'd been taken on there.
Then, swinging into the saddle, they rode down the slope, splashed through the creek, and entering the further pasture by a gate, headed south at a brisk lope. The land comprising the Shoe-Bar ranch was a roughly rectangular strip, much longer than it was wide, which skirted the foothills of the Escalante Mountains.
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