g for his answer, "ain't that
straight?"

"Sure," said Hardy absently.

Swope glared at him for a moment disapprovingly.

"Huh, you're a hell of a cowman," he grunted. "What ye goin' to do
about it?"

"About what?" inquired Hardy innocently.

"Aw, you know," replied Swope impatiently. "How about that upper
range?" He shoved back his chair as he spoke, and his eyes lit up in
anticipation of the battle.

"Well," responded Hardy judicially, "if you've got the legal right to
go up there, and if you're goin' where you dam' please, anyhow, it
don't look like I could do anything." He paused and smiled patiently
at the sheepman.

"You know very well, Mr. Swope," he said, "that if you want to go up
on that mesa and sheep off the feed we haven't got any legal means of
preventing you. But you know, too, that there isn't more than enough
feed for what cows the boys have left. If you want to go up there,
that's your privilege--and if you want to go out over The Rolls,
that's all right, too."

"Of course you don't give a dam'!" said Swope satirically.

"I guess you know how I feel, all right," returned Hardy, and then he
lapsed into silence, while Swope picked his teeth and thought.

"Where'd you come from?" he said at last, as if, forgetting all that
had passed, his mind had come back from a far country, unbiassed by
the facts.

"Over the mountains," replied Hardy, jerking his thumb toward the
east.

"Don't have no sheep over there, do they?" inquired Swope.

"Nope, nothing but cattle and horses."

"Ump!" grunted the sheepman, and then, as if the matter was settled
thereby, he said: "All right, pardner, bein' as you put it that way, I
reckon I'll go around."

CHAPTER VII

HELL'S HIP POCKET

In the days of Ahaz, king of Judah, Isaiah the son of Amoz is reported
to have seen in a vision a wolf which dwelt with a lamb, while a lion
ate straw like an ox, and a weaned child put his hand in the
cockatrice's den. Equally beautiful, as a dream, was the peace at
Hidden Water, where sheepman and cattleman sat down together in amity;
only, when it was all over, the wolf wiped his chops and turned away
with a wise smile--the millennium not having come, as yet, in
Arizona.

Hardy's wrist was a little lame, figuratively speaking, from throwing
flapjacks for hungry sheep herders, and the pile of grain and baled
hay in the storehouse had dwindled materially; but as the sheep came
through, band after band, and each