To a man used to the noise and turmoil of the round-up and branding pen and accustomed to the necessary cruelties of stock raising there was nothing in the scene to attract attention. But Hardy was of gentler blood, inured to the hardships of frontier life but not to its unthinking brutality, and as he beheld for the first time the waste, the hurry, the greed of it all, his heart turned sick and his eyes glowed with pity, like a woman's. By his side the sunburned swarthy giant who had taken him willy-nilly for a friend sat unmoved, his lip curled, not at the pity of it, but because they were sheep; and because, among the men who rushed about driving them with clubs and sacks, he saw more than one who had eaten at his table and then sheeped out his upper range. His saturnine mood grew upon him as he waited and, turning to Hardy, he shouted harshly: "There's some of your friends over yonder," he said, jerking his thumb toward a group of men who were weighing the long sacks of wool. "Want to go over and get acquainted?" Hardy woke from his dream abruptly and shook his head. "No, let's not stop," he said, and Creede laughed silently as he reined Bat Wings into the trail. But just as they started to go one of the men by the scales hailed them, motioning with his hand and, still laughing cynically, the foreman of the Dos S turned back again. "That's Jim Swope," he said, "one of our big sheep men--nice feller--you'll like him." He led the way to the weighing scales, where two sweating Mexicans tumbled the eight-foot bags upon the platform, and a burly man with a Scotch turn to his tongue called off the weights defiantly. At his elbow stood two men, the man who had called them and a wool buyer,--each keeping tally of the count. Jim Swope glanced quickly up from his work. He was a man not over forty but bent and haggard, with a face wrinkled deep with hard lines, yet lighted by blue eyes that still held a twinkle of grim humor. "Hello, Jeff," he said, jotting down a number in his tally book, "goin' by without stoppin', was ye? Better ask the cook for somethin' to eat. Say, you're goin' up the river, ain't ye? Well, tell Pablo Moreno and them Mexicans I lost a cut of two hundred sheep up there somewhere. That son of a--of a herder of mine was too lazy to make a corral and count 'em, so I don't know where they are lost, but I'll give two bits a head for 'em, delivered here. Tell the old man that, will you?" He paused to enter another weight in his book, then stepped away from the scales and came out to meet them. "How's the feed up your way?" he inquired, smiling grimly. "Dam' pore," replied Creede, carrying on the jest, "and it'll be poorer still if you come in on me, so keep away. Mr. Swope, I'll make you acquainted with Mr. Hardy--my new boss. Judge Ware has sent him out to be superintendent for the Dos S."