The Laramie cabin on Turkey Creek--the son built afterward on the same spot--stood on a slight conical rise some distance back from the little stream that watered the ranch. From his windows Jim Laramie could look on gently falling ground in all directions. Toward the creek lay an alfalfa field which, with a crude irrigating ditch and water from the creek, he had brought to a prosperous stand. Below the alfalfa stood the barn and the corral. The day after Kate Doubleday's adventure with him at the Junction, Laramie was riding up the creek to his cabin when a man standing at the corral gate hailed him. It wag Ben Simeral. Ben, old and ragged, met every man with a smile--a bearded, seamed and shabby smile, but an honest smile. Ben was a derelict of the range, a stray whose appeal could be only to patient men. Whenever he wandered into the Falling Wall country, where he had a claim, he made Laramie's cabin a sort of headquarters and spent weeks at a time there, looking after the stock in return for what John Lefever termed the "court'sies" of the ranch. Laramie, greeting Ben, made casual inquiry about the stock. Ben looked at him as if expectant; but Ben was not aggressive for news or anything else. He grinned as he looked Laramie over: "Well, you're back again, Jim." Laramie responded in kindly fashion: "Anybody been here?" "Nary critter," declared the custodian, "'cept Abe Hawk--he came over to borry your Marlin rifle." "What did he want with that?" "Said he was going up into the mountains but he's comin' over again before he starts. I knowed he helped you track them wire scouts over to Barb's. The blame critters tore off all the wire t'other side the creek, too. Get any track of 'em?" he asked, sympathetically alive to what had been most on Laramie's mind when he had started from home. Laramie barely hesitated but he looked squarely at Ben and answered in even tones: "No track, Ben." Ben looked at him, still smiling with a kindly hope: "Hear from the contest on the creek quarter?" "They told me at Medicine Bend it had gone against me." "Psho! Never! You've got another 'go' to Washington, hain't y'?" Laramie nodded and got down from his horse. Ben, removing the saddle, asked more questions--none of them important--and after putting up the horse the two men started for the house. Its rude walls were well laid up in good logs on which rested a timbered roof, shingled.