"There's all my available cash. Of course there was some in securities I
couldn't realize on by the terms of father's will, and if I go to the wall
I can always get enough to live on out of that. But my idea is to get a
living out of _this_, and just now I am in the very devil of a fix."

"How?"

Bud narrated briefly the stormy events that had led up to this final
stroke by which he hoped to defeat the cowmen and save his own fortune;
and as he did so he observed his brother closely.

Lester Larkin was three years younger than Bud, was smaller, and had grown
up with a weak and vacillating character. The youngest child in the
wealthy Larkin family, he had been spoiled and indulged until when a
youth in his teens he had become the despair of them all.

Even now, despite the tanned look of health he had acquired, it could
still be seen that he was by no means the strong, virile young man that
Bud had become. His face was rather delicate than rugged in outline; his
brown hair was inclined to curl, and his blue eyes were large and
beautiful.

The sensitive mouth was still wilful, though character was beginning to
show there. He was, in fact, a grand mistake in upbringing. With all the
instincts of a lover of beauty he had been raised by a couple of dull
parents to a rule-of-thumb existence that started in a business office
late one morning and ended in a cafe early the next.

It was the kind of life to which the poor laborer looks up with consuming
envy, and which makes him what he thinks is a socialist. Given a couple of
sharp pencils and some blocks of paper, along with sympathy and
encouragement, Lester Larkin might have become a writer or an artist of no
mean ability.

But the elder Larkin, believing that what had made one generation would
make another, had started young Lester on a high stool in his office with
a larger percentage of dire results than he had ever imagined could accrue
to the employment of one individual. With the high stool went a low wage
and a lot of wholesome admonitions--and this, after a boyhood and early
youth spent in the very lap of luxury.

Thus, when the father died, the boy, at nineteen, knew more ways to spend
a dollar than his father had at thirty-nine, and less ways to earn it than
his father at nine. So much for Lester.

"Well, if I can help you in any way, Bud, let me know," he said when his
brother had finished his story of the range war that was now reaching its
climax. "