e Arizona's expression, when, from the doorway of the
bunkhouse, he saw the mare crawling up the trail toward the ranch--

"Guess she's loaded down till her springs is nigh busted."

And Tresler laughed outright in Jake's face when that individual came
into the barn, while he was rubbing her down, and generally returning
good for evil, and found fault with his work.

"Where, I'd like to know, have you been all this time?" he asked
angrily. Then, as his eyes took in the pitiful sight of the exhausted
mare, "Say, you've ruined that mare, and you'll have to make it good.
We don't keep horses for the hands to founder. D'you see what you've
done? You've broke her heart."

"And if I'd had the chance I'd have broken her neck too," Tresler
retorted, with so much heat, that, in self-defense, the foreman was
forced to leave him alone.

That afternoon the real business of ranching began. Lew Cawley was
sent out with Tresler to instruct him in mending barbed-wire fences.
A distant pasture had been broken into by the roving cattle outside.
Lew remained with him long enough to show him how to strain the wires
up and splice them, then he rode off to other work.

Tresler was glad to find himself out on the prairie away from the
unbearable influence of the ranch foreman. The afternoon was hot, but
it was bright with the sunshine, which, in the shadow of the
mountains, is so bracing. The pastures he was working in were
different from the lank weedy-grown prairie, although of the same
origin. They were irrigated, and had been sown and re-sown with
timothy grass and clover. The grass rose high up to the horse's knees
as he rode, and the quiet, hard-working animal, his own property,
reveled in the sweet-scented fodder which he could nip at as he moved
leisurely along.

And Tresler worked very easily that afternoon. Not out of indolence,
not out of any ill-feeling toward his foreman. He was weary after his
morning's exertions, and, besides, the joy of being out in the pure,
bright air, on that wondrous sea of rolling green grass with its
illimitable suggestion of freedom and its gracious odors, seduced him
to an indolence quite foreign to him. He was beyond the view of the
ranch, with two miles of prairie rollers intervening, so he did his
work without concern for time.

It was well after four o'clock when the last strand of wire was strung
tight. Then, for want of a shady tree to lean his back against, he sat
down by a fence post