how easy to lay down--gayly, bitterly, lightly,
or quietly perhaps; but not cheaply. He remembered the last words of
the boy who now lay there, shrouded and silent,--"I've got to take my
medicine."

"It's not a question of being happy," thought Dan Anderson, "but of
doing your work, and taking your medicine."

CHAPTER XXII

ADVENTURE AT HEART'S DESIRE

_The Strange Story of the King of Gee-Whiz, and his Unusual Experience
in Foreign Parts_

In the absence of McKinney with the sheriff's posse, Curly became, by
virtue of seniority, acting foreman on the Carrizoso ranch. Grieving
over the edict which held him home from sheriffing, and disconsolate
now that Ellsworth and Constance had departed, he sought an outlet for
his feelings. "I'll show folks what a real cow foreman is like," he
asserted, and forthwith began plans which, in his opinion, had been too
long deferred by the more conservative McKinney.

The wagons of the Carrizoso cow outfit came into town one morning, with
a requisition for all the loose .44-caliber ammunition that could be
bought, begged, or commandeered under the plea of urgent necessity.
Whiteman burrowed through his stock from top to bottom, but still the
new foreman growled at the insufficiency.

"There's more'n five thousand sheep in that bunch that has just crossed
the Nogales," said he, "and we've got to kill 'em, every one. Do you
suppose my men is goin' to take to clubs, like Digger Injuns?"

Whiteman could only shrug. There had always been ammunition in Heart's
Desire sufficient for all benevolent and social purposes. No one had
suspected sheep. The Carrizoso plateau had been sacred ground, and it
was unsupposable that it could ever be desecrated by the trampling
hoofs and scissor noses of these woolly abominations. Grumbling, Curly
rode away with his wagons, surrounded by a group of be-Winchestered cow
punchers, not unlike that which had accompanied Stillson out at the
other end of the town.

It was two days before they returned. When they did so, two of the men
were not in their saddles, but at the bottom of a wagon. Beside them,
bucked up and bound, lay a strange and long-haired figure, at which the
new foreman occasionally looked back with a gaze of mingled curiosity
and respect.

It appeared that Carrizoso cow honor had been maintained. The five
thousand sheep had been rounded up in a box canon, and scrupulously
killed to the last item, while two herders went