“That was where old Hartley got in his work. He had a bunch of sheep, and stay where he belonged he wouldn’t. He’d slip out on good grass and fence up a spring or little lake that might be waterin’ a thousand head of cattle. If a bunch of cows come in to water, he’d sic his dogs on ’em till they’d quit the earth. If a round-up swung his way he’d knock down his fence and move out. It was a big country and hard to watch, but they caught him once or twice, and drove him back where he belonged. They give him all the show in the world to be on the square, but he wouldn’t--he wasn’t built that way. He swore ‘by God’ that he had as much right to drive his blatin’, stinkin’ woolly-backs all over the range as the cowmen had to turn their longhorns loose on the country. He was a big, burly, noisy-mouthed cuss, with the muscle of a pack-mule and the soul of a prairie-dog. He was game, for all his low-down ways, but he went up against the cowmen once too often; a round-up headed him north one day with his sheep and a camp-wagon, and sent a couple of riders along to see that he kept a-goin’. Then they swung around to his home ranch and made a bonfire of it, to show the rest of the ca-na-na’s that there’d be no monkey business on the Hash-Knife range. “I didn’t see nor hear of him no more till that fall. Then the layout I was workin’ for bought a bunch of cattle over here and sent me to rep for ’em--same as I’m doin’ now. I was huntin’ for the Big Four wagon, which was supposed to be workin’ on the upper part of the White Mud, when I struck his trail. Comin’ north along the creek one day I turned a bend and come on a fellow talkin’ to a girl. It was Stella Hartley. I met her once at a dance on Powder River, and I knowed her the minute I laid eyes on her. She was about as nice a little girl as ever struck Custer County. “I rode up and says ‘Howdy’ to her, and then I see it was Bobby Collins she was talkin’ to. I knew him, too--one of the whitest boys on earth, and the swiftest woddy that ever turned a cow. ‘Hash-Knife Bob’ they called him, over in Custer. “‘M’ son,’ says I, ‘I’m sure glad to see you. But how’d you come to stray off into this wilderness?’