oys?" And
then, with faint exasperation, "Doesn't any one ever talk any more on
this ranch?"

Sam Pretty Cow gave him a swift, oblique glance and spat accurately at
a great horsefly that had lighted on a board end.

"Not much, you bet. Nh-hn."

Lance called to Shorty, who had set his milk buckets down that he
might open the little gate that swung inward,--the gate which horses
were not supposed to know anything about.

"Oh-h, Shorty! Where did dad and the boys go this morning?"

Shorty turned slowly, pulling the gate open and propping it with a
stick until he had set the buckets through. Deliberation was in his
manner, deliberation was in his speech.

"Las' night, you mean. They hit out right after midnight."

"Well, where did they _go?_" Lance ground his cigarette under his
heel.

"You might ask 'em when they git back," Shorty suggested cryptically,
and closed the gate just as carefully as if forty freedom-hungry
horses were milling inside the corral.

Lance watched him go and turned to Sam Pretty Cow who, having thrust
his hay fork behind a brace in the stable wall, was preparing to vary
his tobacco-chewing with a smoke.

"What's the mystery, Sam? Where did they go? I'm here to stay, and I'm
one of the family--I _think_--and you may as well tell me."

Sam Pretty Cow lipped the edge of his cigarette paper, folded it down
smoothly on the tiny roll of tobacco, leaned his body backward and
painstakingly drew a match from the small pocket of his grimy blue
overalls.

"I'm don' _know_ nothing," he vouchsafed equably. "I'm don' ask
nothing. I'm don' hear nothing. You bet. Nh-hn--yore damn right."

From under his lashes Lance watched Sam Pretty Cow. "I was over
helping hold old Scotty in his bed, the other day," he said
irrelevantly. "He was crazy--out of his head. He kept yelling that
the Lorrigans were stealing his stock. He kept saying that a few more
marks with a straight branding iron would turn his Eleven into an NL,
ANL, DNL, LNL--any one of the Devil's Tooth brands. Crazy with fever,
he was."

Sam Pretty Cow studied the match, decided which was the head of it,
and drew it sharply along his boot sole.

"Yeah--yo're damn right. Crazy, you bet yore life. Uh-huh."

"He said the Miller's Block brand could easily be turned into the N
Block--Belle's brand. He said horses had been run off the range--"

"He's dead," Sam observed unemotionally. "You bet. He's gettin'
fun'ral to-day."

"How long will the