AS LIFE 284

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STEVE YEAGER

CHAPTER I

STEVE MAKES A MISTAKE

Steve Yeager held his bronco to a Spanish trot. Somewhere in front of
him, among the brown hill swells that rose and fell like waves of the
sea, lay Los Robles and breakfast. One solitary silver dollar, too
lonesome even to jingle, lay in his flatulent trouser pocket. After he
and Four Bits had eaten, two quarters would take the place of the big
cartwheel. Then would come dinner, a second transfer of capital, and his
pocket would be empty as a cow's stomach after a long drive.

Being dead broke, according to the viewpoint of S. Yeager, is right and
fitting after a jaunt to town when one has a good job back in the hills.
But it happened he had no more job than a rabbit. Wherefore, to keep up
his spirits he chanted the endless metrical version of the adventures of
Sam Bass, who

"... started out to Texas a cowboy for to be,
And a kinder-hearted fellow you scarcely ever'd see."

Steve had not quit his job. It had quit him. A few years earlier the
Lone Star Cattle Company had reigned supreme in Dry Sandy Valley and
the territory tributary thereto. Its riders had been kings of the range.
That was before the tide of settlement had spilled into the valley,
before nesters had driven in their prairie schooners, homesteaded the
water-holes, and strung barb-wire fences across the range. Line-riders
and dry farmers and irrigators had pushed the cowpuncher to one side.
Sheep had come bleating across the desert to wage war upon the cattle.
Finally Uncle Sam had sliced off most of the acreage still left and
called it a forest reserve.

Wherefore the Lone Star outfit had thrown up its hands, sold its
holdings, and moved to Los Angeles to live. Wherefore also Steve Yeager,
who did not know Darwin from a carburetor, had by process of evolution
been squeezed out of the occupation he had followed all of his
twenty-three years since he could hang on to a saddle-horn. He had
mournfully foreseen the end when the schoolhouse was built on Pine Knob
and little folks went down the road with their arms twined around the
waist of teacher. After grizzled Tim Sawyer made bowlegged tracks
straight for that schoolmarm and matrimony, his friends realized that
the joyous whoop of the puncher would not much longer be heard in the
land. The range-rider must dwindle to a farm