n again to the big pasture. Then Phil opened
another gate, and the little band dashed wildly through, to find
themselves in the small meadow pasture where they would pass the last
night before the one great battle of their lives--a battle that would be
for them a dividing point between those years of ease and freedom which
had been theirs from birth and the years of hard and useful service that
were to come.

Phil sat on his horse at the gate watching with critical eye as the
unbroken animals raced away. "Some good ones in the bunch this year,
Uncle Will," he commented to his employer, who, standing on the watering
trough in the other corral, was looking over the fence.

"There's bound to be some good ones in every bunch," returned Mr.
Baldwin. "And some no account ones, too," he added, as his foreman
dismounted beside him.

Then, while the young man slipped the bridle from his horse and stood
waiting for the animal to drink, the older man regarded him silently, as
though in his own mind the Dean's observation bore somewhat upon Phil
himself. That was always the way with the Dean. As Sheriff Fellows once
remarked to Judge Powell in the old days of the cattle rustlers' glory,
"Whatever Bill Baldwin says is mighty nigh always double-barreled."

There are also two sides to the Dean. Or, rather, to be accurate, there
is a front and a back. The back--flat and straight and broad--indicates
one side of his character--the side that belongs with the square chin
and the blue eyes that always look at you with such frank directness. It
was this side of the man that brought him barefooted and penniless to
Arizona in those days long gone when he was only a boy and Arizona a
strong man's country. It was this side of him that brought him
triumphantly through those hard years of the Indian troubles, and in
those wild and lawless times made him respected and feared by the
evildoers and trusted and followed by those of his kind who, out of the
hardships and dangers of those turbulent days, made the Arizona of
to-day. It was this side, too, that finally made the barefoot, penniless
boy the owner of the Cross-Triangle Ranch.

I do not know the exact number of the Dean's years--I only know that his
hair is grey, and that he does not ride as much as he once did. I have
heard him say, though, that for thirty-five years he lived in the
saddle, and that the Cross-Triangle brand is one of the oldest irons in
the State. And I know, too, that