y had assured him that everything possible would be done to
relieve the situation. Did it not, then, he demanded, behoove the
law-abiding residents of prospective forest reserves to cooperate with
such an enlightened administration, even at the risk of some temporary
personal loss? And with one voice the Four Peaks cowmen agreed that it
did. There was something eerie about it--the old judge was dazed by
their acquiescence.

Of all the cowmen at Hidden Water, Rufus Hardy was the only man who
would discuss the matter at length. A change had come over him now; he
was very thin and quiet, with set lines along his jaw, but instead of
riding nervously up and down the river as he had the year before he
lingered idly about the ranch, keeping tally at the branding and
entertaining his guests. No matter how pedantic or polemical the old
judge became, Hardy was willing to listen to him; and Lucy, hovering
in the background, would often smile to hear them argue, the judge
laying down the law and equity of the matter and Rufus meeting him
like an expert swordsman with parry and thrust. Day by day, his
prejudice wearing away from lack of any real opposition, Judge Ware
became more and more pleased with his daughter's superintendent; but
Lucy herself was troubled. There was a look in his eyes that she had
never seen before, a set and haggard stare that came when he sat
alone, and his head was always turned aside, as if he were listening.
The sheep came trooping in from the south, marching in long lines to
the river's edge, and still he sat quiet, just inside the door,
listening.

"Tell me, Rufus," she said, one day when her father was inspecting the
upper range with Creede, "what is it that made you so sad? Is
it--Kitty?"

For a minute he gazed at her, a faint smile on his lips.

"No," he said, at last, "it is not Kitty." And then he lapsed back
into silence, his head turned as before.

The wind breathed through the _corredor_, bringing with it a distant,
plaintive bleating--the sheep, waiting beyond the turbid river to
cross.

"I have forgotten about Kitty," he said absently. "For me there is
nothing in the world but sheep. Can't you hear them bleating down
there?" he cried, throwing out his hands. "Can't you smell them? Ah,
Lucy, if you knew sheep as I do! I never hear a sheep now that I don't
think of that day last year when they came pouring out of Hell's Hip
Pocket with a noise like the end of the world. If I had been the