r such circumstances, would be seeing
trouble, and mighty quick, too."

"There's another thing that we've got to watch out for, just now," Phil
continued, a few minutes later, "and that is, 'sleepers'. We'll
suppose," he explained, "that I want to build up my, bunch of Five-Bars,
and that I am not too particular about how I do it. Well, I run on to an
unbranded Pot-Hook-S calf that looks good to me, but I don't dare put my
iron on him because he's too young to leave his mother. If I let him go
until he is older, some of Jim Reid's riders will brand him, and, you
see, I never could work over the Pot-Hook-S iron into my Five-Bar. So I
earmark the calf with the owner's marks, and don't brand him at all.
Then he's a sleeper. If the Pot-Hook-S boys see him, they'll notice that
he's earmarked all right, and very likely they'll take it for granted
that he's branded, or, perhaps let him go anyway. Before the next rodeo
I run on to my sleeper again, and he's big enough now to take away from
the cow, so all I have to do is to change the earmarks and brand him
with my iron. Of course, I wouldn't get all my sleepers, but--the
percentage would be in my favor. If too many sleepers show up in the
rodeo, though, folks would get mighty suspicious that someone was too
handy with his knife. We got a lot of sleepers in the last rodeo," he
concluded quietly.

And Patches, remembering what Little Billy had said about Nick Cambert
and Yavapai Joe, and with the talk of the visiting cowboys still fresh
in his mind, realized that he was making progress in his education.

Riding leisurely, and turning frequently aside for a nearer view of the
cattle they sighted here and there, they reached Toohey a little before
noon. Here, in a rocky hollow of the hills, a small stream wells from
under the granite walls, only to lose itself a few hundred yards away in
the sands and gravel of the wash. But, short as its run in the daylight
is, the water never fails. And many cattle come from the open range that
lies on every side, to drink, and, in summer time, to spend the heat of
the day, standing in the cool, wet sands or lying in the shade of the
giant sycamores that line the bank opposite the bluff. There are corrals
near-by and a rude cook-shack under the wide-spreading branches of an
old walnut tree; and the ground of the flat open space, a little back
from the water, is beaten bare and hard by the thousands upon thousands
of cattle that have at many a