on his
horse by them, a rifle across his saddle bow. The Ranger said little at
the time, and the two men went home to supper. After eating, as they sat
there, the Ranger said his say. He told the grazer what were the orders
he had, and that he would have to live up to them. But the grazer had a
copy of 'orders,' too, and he had hired a lawyer to find out how he
could get out of them. So he lit into the Ranger.

"'You see, Mac,' he said, 'those orders don't mean anything. They may be
all right in Washington, but they don't go here. You can't stop me, nor
arrest me, nor hurt my sheep. Your bosses won't stand by you if you get
into any mix-up. The best thing you can do is to stay here to-night, and
then go home. Make a report on it, if you like, I don't care."

"And then the Ranger began," the boy went on. "The old hunter told me
that this little bit of an Irishman told the grazer about his work as a
Ranger. He told him how he had seen the good that was going to be done,
and that having put his hand to the plow, he couldn't let it go again.
He didn't know much about it, and he'd never tried to talk about it
before, but the natural knack of talking which his race always has came
to help him out. Then he began to talk of the sheep and cattle war, and
the shame that it was to have them killing each other's flocks and
shooting each other because they could not agree about the right to
grass.

"'An' there's one more thing,' he said, ''tis only the other day that I
was talkin' to the "little white lady," and she said she knew that you
wouldn't be the one to start up trouble again.' And he wound up with an
appeal to his better judgment, which, so the old hunter told me the
grazer said afterward, would have got a paralyzed mule on the move.

"When he got through, Burleigh merely answered:

"'Mac, take that blanket and go to bed. I'll talk to you in the
morning.'

"When the Ranger woke, a little after daylight, the grazer sat beside
his blanket, smoking. He began without wasting any time.

"'Mac,' he said, 'I'm going to take my sheep out to-day. Not because of
any of your little bits of printed orders--I could drive a whole herd
through them; and not because of any of your bosses back in Washington,
who wouldn't know a man's country if they ever got into it, and couldn't
find their way out; and not entirely because, as you say, "the little
white lady" trusts me, though perhaps that's got a good deal to do with
it. But when