"Yender's Beulah Pierce!" Ben snapped this out savagely. The wagon was half a mile ahead. Pierce was driving, and in the rear seat were two figures whom they knew to be Mrs. Laithe and her brother. As Ben had pointedly ignored these Ewing did not refer to them. They came to a gate in a wire fence that stretched interminably away on either side, over brown, low-rolling hills. Pierce had left the gate open for them, and Ewing got out to close it after they had passed through. "Larabie is building a lot of fence," he said, as they drove on. "At this rate he'll have every school section in Hinsdale County wired in pretty soon." On this impersonal ground Ben seemed willing to meet him. "Me? Know what I'm going to do if Wes' Larabie cuts off any more o' this road with his barb wire? Stick a pair o' wire clippers in the whip socket an' drive through. _That's_ all! You'd think he owned all America, the way he makes people sidle along that fence till he gits good an' ready to make a gate. Me? Make my own gates. Yes, sir! Wire clippers!" With this he was sufficiently cheered to insult vivaciously a couple of dull, incurious Mexicans whom they presently passed, plodding behind a laden burro train. To his opprobrious burst of weirdly entangled Spanish and English he added the taunting bleat of a sheep and a merrily malign gesture eloquent of throats to be slit--the throats of unspeakable sheep herders. He observed with deep disgust that neither of the threatened ones gave any sign of interest in their portended fate. They passed with scarce a lift of their heads. "They're takin' supplies up to that sheep outfit o' Rankin's," grumbled Ben. "Pierce an' some o' the others is talkin' about gettin' in a car load o' saltpeter an' dopin' the range if Rankin lets his herd work down any closeter--have it billed in as hardware or pianos, an' unload the car at night. Serve him right fur bein' a sheep man. An' yet I knowed Nels Rankin, five, six years ago, when there wa'n't a more respectable cuss in the hull San Juan." In passing the Pulcifer ranch they made talk about the hay-cutting, for a reaper sent its locustlike click from a brown stretch of bottom land. Pulcifer had a good stand of hay, they agreed, and probably he wouldn't have such a big winter kill this year if he didn't act the fool and sell off too much of it. You couldn't expect to bring cattle through fat on cottonwood browse. So they lamely gossiped the miles away in strained avoidance of the big event. Only once did Ewing look back, while Ben was occupied with the horses at a ford. The rocky wall at the verge of their lake was intimately near, despite the miles they had come, and below it, through a notch in the hills, he could see a spot of yellow--the new shake roof on a shed they had built that summer near the cabin. Then his eyes were ahead to where Pierce's wagon crawled up a hill. Ben whipped up the horses and burst into song: