“You’re a cantankerous cuss,” Mormon Jack calmly returned. “If I wasn’t a stranger in a hostile camp I’d climb your carcass for them insultin’ observations. Besides, it aint good for a kid to sleep too much. I don’t see how you got the heart to lay here snorin’ like a cayuse chokin’ down, when you could be sittin’ up enjoyin’ this here beautiful scenery that’s bein’ desecrated with bawlin’ cows and buckin’ bronks and greasy, old round-up wagons. You aint got no sense of nacheral beauty, Kid. You’re just about as ornery a varmint as old man Hartley, what once inhabited this same flat.” “I’ve heard of him,” answered the now thoroughly awakened Layton. “He happened before my time, though. Were you in the country when they cleaned him out?” “You bet I was!” Mormon Jack replied. “I knew him before he came over here, and I was here and saw his finish. There was high old jinks on this little green bottom that day.” “So I’ve heard. He wanted to make a sheep-feedin’ ground of the east bench, didn’t he? How was it?” Layton propped himself up on his elbow to listen. Mormon Jack settled his head comfortably against a rolled-up bed. He rolled a cigarette daintily and inhaled many breaths of smoke before replying. “Old man Hartley was a bone-headed cuss,” he began, at length, “that wouldn’t learn better--even by experience. He was like a fool buck-sheep that persists in buttin’ everything that gets in his way, no matter how much he hurts his head. It aint the sheep’s fault; it’s the breed of him, and the way he was raised--and I guess that was the trouble with old Hartley. “I come across him, first time, over in the Hash-Knife country, a little while after they quit drivin’ herds up the Long Trail. The railway come in, and you could bring a bunch of cattle from the Panhandle up there in a week--it took five months on the trail. Likewise, the railway brought farmers and pilgrims and woolly-backs by the train-load, and turned ’em loose promiscus on the country, where they made more trouble with their homestead rights and barb-wire fences than all the Injuns that ever run buffalo or lifted hair. “It wasn’t long till there was heaps of trouble on the range. A tenderfoot would file on a claim, prove up, and as soon as he got his papers a big sheep outfit would own the land--you know how they do. Pretty soon the big sheepmen began to fence the water-holes, claim or no claim, and hell broke loose. After considerable killin’ and burnin’ and layin’ for each other, they patched up a peace; the sheepmen that didn’t get killed off stayed on the creeks where they was settled, and the cow outfits held what was left of the open range.