As the spring days lengthened there was, too, less time for visiting. To the sagebrush homesteader the sixty days of May and June are the heart of the year's labor and a man must keep things moving from dawn to dark, if he means to get ahead. No sooner is the frost out of the ground, no sooner have the break-up floods of snow water run off, the quaking morass of meadow-lands grown solid earth once more, than the plow must be started. Harry had learned to handle the four-horse disk plow and the harrow as well, so, while Rob worked one team she handled the other. They now had four heavy work horses, besides three colts that could be used off and on, and quite a bunch of half-broke and young stuff belonging to Owens, which they worked as payment for their feed; thus there were few idle hours while the spring drive lasted. To Harry each new morning was a fresh adventure and whenever Rob did not need her for an hour or so, she explored the steep sides of the rocky buttes, the narrow cañons separating them, and the tree-filled "draw" behind the house. Nor was it altogether careless amusement which led her to this. She had discovered that a good many other people went to and fro through the cañons and across the foothills near by: surveyors, sheepherders, looking for strayed stock, and men who were just "going through." Often these various wayfarers carried "guns" that were sometimes rifles but oftener, especially late in summer, shotguns. And it had not taken Harry long to discover that the men with shot guns were after grouse and sage hen. From the time of her arrival on the ranch she had been interested in the wild birds and had soon begun trying to protect them. Rob had hung "no shooting" signs along all the fences and already the birds seemed to know that they were protected in that spot and came fearlessly to feed in the alfalfa and close to the house. But even signs and outspoken orders would not keep a certain class of game butchers away. They came even before the season opened, shooting early in the morning and trusting to the lack of settlers to escape arrest. Harry had several times driven off these poachers, but there was one who persisted in defying her. That was Joe Biane. He was so sly, so sharp, so indifferent to all remonstrance or warning that Harry realized it was useless to threaten with words only; if he would shoot on her land he should be punished. She came to this decision one morning in May when she had run out to try and get a snapshot of a grouse cock strutting on the edge of the alfalfa. She had moved cautiously along behind the currant bushes until just within the right distance to get a good picture and was adjusting the camera when a shotgun cracked in the draw above her.