round-up. The
homesteaders must make one more trip to the railroad to freight in the
stacker and the two buck-sweeps to be used in putting up the hay. This
trip was delayed only till the round-up crew was back from the range
for a week of leisure and could act as guards while the others were
away.

As the tangible results of the work became more apparent Harris's
vigilance increased. There was now more than plowed ground to work on;
crops to be trampled at a time when they would not lift again to permit
of mowing; fences to be wrecked so that range stock might have free
access to the fields. A single night could upset the work of many
months. But as he stood with Billie at the mouth of the lane he
allowed none of his thoughts to be reflected in his speech.

It was two hours before dark and the perspective toward the east was
already foreshortened. Two jackrabbits hopped into the lane and moved
down toward the meadow. The homesteaders had turned their hands to
another job. Tiny and Russ, shod with rubber boots, were leaning on
their long-handled shovels in the forty nearest the house. Beyond them
the other irrigators were spreading the water over the growing crops.

Billie Warren half-closed her eyes and viewed the broad expanse of
rippling green in the bottoms. How many times she had stood here in
the past with old Cal Warren while he visioned this very picture which
now unrolled before her eyes in reality; the transformation of the
Three Bar flat from a desert waste to a scene of abundant fertility
under the reclaiming touch of water.

It was a quiet picture of farm life if one looked only upon the
blooming fields and took no account of the raw, barren foothills that
flanked them,--the gaunt, towering range behind. She found it
difficult to link the scene before her with the deviltry of a few
months past. The killing of Bangs and Rile Foster's consequent grim
retaliation; the raid on Three Bar bulls and the stampede of her trail
herd; all those seemed part of some life so long in the past as to form
no part of her present.

The continued immunity had had its effect, regardless of her earlier
suspicions. She still realized the possibility of further raids but
they had been so long delayed that the prospect had ceased to impress
her as imminent. Tiny and Russ changed their head of water. As they
shifted positions she noted that each carried some tool beside his
irrigator's shovel. No man in the fie