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Updated: June 1, 2025
And lugging along a bunch of extra mounts, too, in the bargain? No, I rather think, Bob, that those fellows must have some of Mendoza's cattle rustlers. And they've been making a dandy raid on some ranch's saddle herd; or I miss my guess." "Perhaps the Circle outfit had gotten careless," suggested Bob.
All the hues of Aurora could not win him from the pink pages of a sporting journal. "Get something for nothing," was his mission in life; "Thirty-seventh" Street was his goal. Nearly two months after his arrival he began to complain that he felt worse. It was then that he became the ranch's incubus, its harpy, its Old Man of the Sea.
From the Arrowhead corrals I strolled up the poplar-bordered lane that leads past the bunk house to the castle of the ranch's chatelaine. It was a still Sunday afternoon the placid interlude, on a day of rest, between the chores of the morning and those of evening. But the calm was for the ear alone. To the eye certain activities, silent but swift, were under way.
Old Ben and Young Ben and Linn, the bird dogs; the dachshunds; the mongrels of the men's quarters; all the domestic fowls; the innumerable and blue-blooded hogs; the polo ponies and brood mares, the stud horses and driving horses and cow horses, colts, yearlings, the young and those enjoying a peaceful and honourable old age; Pollymckittrick; Redmond's cat and fifty others, half-wild creatures; vireos and orioles in the trees around the house; thousands and thousands of blackbirds rising in huge swarms like gnats; full-voiced meadowlarks on the fence posts; herons stalking solemnly, or waiting like so many Japanese bronzes for a chance at a gopher; red-tailed hawks circling slowly; pigeon hawks passing with their falcon dart; little gaudy sparrow hawks on top the telephone poles; buzzards, stately and wonderful in flight, repulsive when at rest; barn-owls dwelling in the haystacks, and horned owls in the hollow trees; the game in countless numbers; all the smaller animals and tiny birds in species too numerous to catalogue, all these drew their full sustenance of life from the ranch's smiling abundance.
Very likely she will be wanting a hunk of ham and a dish of beans after her drive." Mrs. MacIntyre, the housekeeper, as much a fixture on the place as the lake or the live-oaks, received the imputation of the ranch's resources of refreshment with mild indignation, and was about to give it utterance when Octavia spoke. "Oh, Mrs. MacIntyre, don't apologize for Teddy. Yes, I call him Teddy.
But this very unreliability forces the ranchman to the next element in our consideration of the ranch's people the Orientals. They are good workers, these little brown and yellow men, and unobtrusive and skilled. They do not quit until the job is done; they live frugally; they are efficient. The only thing we have against them is that we are afraid of them. They crowd our people out.
Good boy, Lacey!" he shouted, but Lacey did not hear him in the uproar. "An' he's worse off than we are, being alone," commented Neal. "Hey! One of us better make a break for help my ranch's the nearest. What d'ye say?" "It's suicide; they'll get you before you get ten feet," Barr replied with conviction. "No; they won't the corral hides the back door, an' all the firing is on this side.
Hetty set the strange object on a shelf and turned to the task of cleaning up. Johnny Culpepper, the ranch's other full-time hand and Hetty's assistant manager, drove the pickup into the yard just before noon. He parked in the shade of the huge cottonwood tree beside the house and bounced out with an armload of mail and newspapers.
She could not let him die, that she knew; but how might she save him? The strains of music and the laughter from the bunkhouse had ceased. The ranch slept. Over the brow of the low bluff upon the opposite side of the river a little party of silent horsemen filed downward to the ford. At the bluff's foot a barbed-wire fence marked the eastern boundary of the ranch's enclosed fields.
Kid Wolf crouched low, so that his body would not show above the edge of the wash. At the water hole he drew up in the shelter of a cottonwood to listen. His ears had caught a succession of steady, measured sounds. They came from one of the small adobe outbuildings. Inside, some one was hammering leather. This was the ranch's saddle shop evidently. Very quietly The Kid dismounted.
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