sons,
watched him go without a word or a question. To Mrs. Baldwin he said,
"Just let him alone, Stella. The boy is all right. He's only gone off
somewhere on the range to fight it out alone. Most likely he'll put in
the day watching those wild horses over beyond Toohey. He generally goes
to them when he's bothered about anything or in trouble of any sort."

Patches, who had been sent on an errand of some kind to Fair Oaks, was
returning home early in the afternoon, and had reached the neighborhood
of that spring where he had first encountered Nick Cambert, when he
heard a calf bawling lustily somewhere in the cedar timber not far away.
Familiar as he now was with the voices of the range, the cowboy knew
that the calf was in trouble. The call was one of fright and pain.

Turning aside from his course, he rode, rapidly at first, then more
cautiously, toward the sound. Presently he caught a whiff of smoke that
came with the light breeze from somewhere ahead on the ridge along which
he was riding. Instantly he rode into a thick clump of cedars, and,
dismounting, tied his horse. Then he went on, carefully and silently, on
foot. Soon he heard voices. Again the calf bawled in fright and pain,
and the familiar odor of burning hair was carried to him on the breeze.
Someone was branding a calf.

It might be all right--it might not. Patches was unarmed, but, with
characteristic disregard of consequences, he crept softly forward,
toward a dense growth of trees and brush, from beyond which the noise
and the smoke seemed to come.

He had barely gained the cover when he heard someone on the other side
ride rapidly away down the ridge. Hastily parting the bushes, he looked
through to catch a glimpse of the horseman, but he was a moment too
late; the rider had disappeared from sight in the timber. But, in a
little open space among the cedars, the cowboy saw Yavapai Joe, standing
beside a calf, fresh-branded with the Four-Bar-M iron, and earmarked
with the Tailholt marks.

Patches knew instantly, as well as though he had witnessed the actual
branding, what, had happened. That part of the range was seldom visited
except by the Dean's cowboys, and the Tailholt Mountain men, knowing
that the Cross-Triangle riders were all at Granite Basin, were making
good use of their opportunities. The man who had ridden away so
hurriedly, a moment too soon for Patches to see him, was, without doubt,
driving the mother of the calf to a distance that