leaving a few of their number to ride line
and incidentally to keep a vigilant eye On the sheep-camps.

David Loring, realizing that he had been checkmated in the first move
of the game in which cattle and sheep were the pawns and cowboys and
herders the castles, knights, and, stretching the metaphor a bit,
bishops, tacitly admitted defeat and employed a diagonal to draw the
cattle-men's forces elsewhere. He determined to locate on the
abandoned water-hole ranch, homestead it, and, by so doing, cut off the
supply of water necessary to the cattle on the west side of the Concho
River. This would be entering the enemy's territory with a vengeance,
yet there was no law prohibiting his homesteading the ranch, the title
of which had reverted to the Government. Too shrewd to risk legal
entanglement by placing one of his employees on the homestead, he
decided to have his daughter file application, and nothing forbade her
employing whom she chose to do the necessary work to prove up. The
plan appealed to the girl for various reasons, one of which was that
she might, by her presence, avert the long-threatened war between the
two factions.

Sundown and, indirectly, Fadeaway precipitated the impending trouble.
Fadeaway, riding for the Blue, was left with a companion to ride line
on the mesas. Sundown, although very much unlike Othello, found that
his occupation was gone. Assistant cooks were a drug on the range. He
was equipped with a better horse, a rope, quirt, slicker, and
instructions to cover daily a strip of territory between the Concho and
the sheep-camps. He became in fact an itinerant patrol, his mere
physical presence on the line being all that was required of him.

It was the Senora Loring who drove to the Concho one morning and was
welcomed by Corliss to whom she gave the little sack of gold. She told
him all that he wished to know in regard to his brother Will, pleading
for him with motherly gentleness. Corliss assured her that he felt no
anger toward his brother, but rather solicitude, and made her happy by
his generous attitude toward the wrongdoer. He had already heard that
his brother had driven to Antelope and taken the train for the West.
His great regret was that Will had not written to him or come to him
directly, instead of leaving to the good Senora the task of
explanation. "Never figured that repenting by proxy was the best
plan," he told the Senora. "But he couldn't have chosen a better
pr