“He told me, then, the whole deal, Stella sittin’ on her horse tryin’ to smile, though she was nearer cryin’ than anything else; she’d been sheddin’ tears pretty considerable, as it was. Away along in the winter Stella ’d promised to marry him, but when the old man got to hear of it he just tore up the earth and swore he’d rather see her dead than married to a cowpuncher. Hash-Knife was for tellin’ him to go to the devil and gettin’ married anyway, but Stella wouldn’t have it that way. His wife bein’ dead, she was the only womankind the old man had, and she couldn’t bear to leave him like that. She said to wait awhile and the old man would come around. So in the spring Bob goes to the head of Powder River, and while he was gone the cow outfits put the run on the old man. When Hash-Knife comes back, Stella and the whole Hartley outfit had vanished plum off the earth. “But Hash-Knife Bob was no quitter. He followed ’em up and located ’em on Milk River. Then he got a job with the Big Four, so’s to be near the girl. He had it figured out that when round-up was over that fall he’d take up a ranch on Milk River, marry Stella, and settle down. But he hadn’t more’n made his plan when old man Hartley breaks out in a fresh place. “As I said before, old Hartley was a bull-headed old bucko. He was worse’n that; he was pig-headed and sheep-headed; he had the contrary stubbornness of all the no-account animals on God’s green earth. You’d ’a’ thought he’d ’a’ taken a tumble to himself after livin’ so long in a sagebrush country, and ’specially after bein’ run out of one part of it. But, no, sir! his way was _the_ way. He wasn’t content on Milk River--he wanted a whole blamed county to graze over. So he went pokin’ around on the north side, and stumbled onto the Crossin’ here. It looked good to him, and without sayin’ a word to anybody but his herder--who was a knot-head like himself and crazy after Stella--he picks up his traps and sashays in here. “There was probably seven or eight big cow outfits rangin’ east of the White Mud then, and they’d just got through havin’ a scrap with the sheep-wranglers, alongside of which the fuss in Custer County was about knee-high. Both of ’em had lots of men and money, but the advantage was on the cowmen’s side, for their boys was fightin’ for their livin’, for outfits they’d been raised with, and the sheepherders was in it for coin and because they didn’t know any better. Anyway, the sheepmen backed off after awhile and made peace--said they’d be good, they’d had enough. The cowmen made the White Mud the dead line; there was to be no sheep-camps on the creek or east of it. And the cowpunchers rode the high pinnacles to see that no sheep crossed the line.