in Antelope Coulee if
we keep on," Jack Bates reminded them. "Wonder where they'll get water?"

"Where's the rest of them going to get water?" Cal Emmett challenged the
crowd. "There's that spring the four women up here pack water from--but
that goes dry in August. And there's the creek--that goes dry too.
On the dead, I feel sorry for the women--and so does Irish," he added
dryly.

Irish made an uncivil retort and swung suddenly away from the group.
"I'm going to ride into town, boys," he announced curtly. "I'll be back
in the morning and go on day-herd."

"Maybe you will and maybe you won't," Weary amended somewhat
impatiently. "This is certainly a poor time for Irish to break out," he
added, watching his double go galloping toward the town road.

"I betche he comes back full and tries to clean out all them nesters,"
Happy Jack predicted. For once no one tried to combat his pessimism--for
that was exactly what every one of them believed would happen.

"He's stayed sober a long while--for him," sighed Weary, who never could
quite shake off a sense of responsibility for the moral defections of
his kinsman. "Maybe I better go along and ride herd on him." Still, he
did not go, and Irish presently merged into the dusky distance.

As is often the case with a family's black sheep, his intentions were
the best, even though they might have been considered unorthodox. While
the Happy Family took it for granted that he was gone because an old
thirst awoke within him, Irish was thinking only of the welfare of
the outfit. He did not tell them, because he was the sort who does not
prattle of his intentions, one way or the other. If he did what he meant
to do there would be time enough to explain; if he failed there was
nothing to be said.

Irish had thought a good deal about the building of that fence, and
about the problem of paying for enough wire and posts to run the fence
straight through from Meeker's south line to the north line of the
Flying U. He had figured the price of posts and the price of wire and
had come somewhere near the approximate cost of the undertaking. He was
not at all sure that the Happy Family had faced the actual figures on
that proposition. They had remarked vaguely that it was going to cost
some money. They had made casual remarks about being broke personally
and, so far as they knew, permanently.

Irish was hot-headed and impulsive to a degree. He was given to
occasional tumultuous sprees, dur