“Oh, I don’t doubt you’d stay on, because you’ve all worked around here so long. You’d all be careless about your wages; you’d do anything for me, yes. That’s because you think I’m a girl. You think you have to. I’m not—you don’t. I’m a business man, like any one else. If I can’t make Del Sol pay I’ve got to give it up; that’s all. “I’m four months behind now,” she added, “and not one of you has whimpered. The store’s naked and you know it. Some of you even may be out of tobacco, but you don’t complain. That’s what cuts me. You’re the finest bunch of hands that ever crossed leather, and I can’t pay you. All right! If I can’t, you can’t work for me.” “But, Miss Taisie, ma’am,” struggled her foreman, “’tain’t nothing a-tall. What’s a few pesos one way or other? We can’t buy nothing, nohow, even if we had money, and don’t want to, noways. “Besides, what’d become of us? Besides, what’d become of you? Have you ever thought of that? Didn’t I promise yore paw, and yore maw, too, that I’d look after you and yore interests long as we was both alive? Well, then? “I ain’t got much savvy outside of cows, ma’am,” he went on; “but cows I do know well as the next. It’s all cows, this part of Texas, and we all know it. There ain’t no market and never will be. We can’t sell cows at six bits a head, or a hide, neither, and we all know that—everybody’s got cows that ain’t worth a damn, ma’am, of course. But what I mean is, if the T.L. can’t make a living there ain’t no ranch in Texas can. I don’t put my hands back of no outfit in the world, ma’am. We’ve run the T.L. on over twelve hundred head of loose stuff this winter, and I told the boys to pick the yearlings and twos careful.” His eyes shifted, he perspired. “We got plenty of water and all outdoors. We didn’t lose one per cent last summer, and winters was when we didn’t lose nothing. The increase is a crime, ma’am. If we’d hold a rodeo in our band—which we’d ought to—God knows how many we’d find in the T.L. I’d bet sixty-five thousand! And the mesquite full of long ears that no man claims. If we can’t do well no stockman in Texas can.” His eyes avoided hers as he gave these Homerically mendacious figures. But he went on stoutly: “Yet you talk of quitting! Why should you? The old Laguna is the richest range in Texas. Our grass sets ’em out a hundred and fifty a head heavier than them damned coasters from below, ma’am. “And if you talk of turning off us men, where’d we go? What’d we do? I ask you that, anyways, ma’am.” “If there was any market,” began Taisie, “it would be different. As it is, the more we brand the poorer we get.” “Well, all right; we ain’t any poorer than our neighbors. Market? Of course there ain’t no market! Rockport has failed—canning cows don’t pay. Hides is low. There’s nothing in the steamship trade, and no use driving East since the war is over. Besides, with such good water and range as we got on Del Sol, why, nothing ever dies; so there ain’t no hides no more.