One day Ike's cattle broke out of the pasture into Bill's young oats, and though Ike hurried after them, it seemed to Bill he might have got them out a little quicker than he did. He said nothing then, however, but when a few days later they broke in again, he went over there in very bad humor. "I want this thing stopped," he said. Ike was mending the fence. He smiled in his sweet way, and said smoothly, "I'm sorry, but when they once git a taste of grain it's pretty hard to keep 'em--" "Well, there ought to be a new fence here," said Bill. "That fence is as rotten as a pumpkin." "I s'pose they had; yes, sir, that's so," Harkey assented quickly. "I'm ready to build my half, you know," he said, "any time--any time you are." "Well, I'll build mine to-morrow," said Bill. "I can't have your cattle pasturing on my oats." "All right, all right. I'll have mine done as quick as yourn." "Well, see't you do; I don't want my grain all tramped into the ground and I ain't a-goin' to have it." Harkey hastily gathered up his tools, saying, "Yes, yes, all right." "You might send home that cow-bell of mine while you're about it," Bill called after him, but Harkey did not reply or turn around. IV The line fence ran up the bluff toward the summit of the ridge to the east. On each side it was set with smooth green slopes of pasture and pleasant squares of wheat, until it reached the woods and ran under the oaks and walnuts and birches to the cliffs of lichen-spotted stone which topped the summit. Bill walked the full length of the fence to see how much of the old material could be used. He recognized the bell on one of Harkey's cattle, and he grew wrathful at the sight of another cow peacefully gnawing the fresh, green grass, with the bell, which belonged to the black cow, on her neck. It was mid-spring. Everywhere was the vivid green of the Wisconsin landscape; the slopes were like carefully tended lawns, without stumps or stones; the groves rose up the hills, pink and gray and green in softly rounded billows of cherry bloom and tender oak and elm foliage. Here and there under the forest tender plants and flowers had sprung up, slender and succulent like all productions of a rich and shadowed soil. Early the next morning Bill and his two hands began to work in the meadow, working toward the ridge; Harkey and his brother and their hands began at the ridge and worked down toward the meadow; each party could hear the axes of the other ringing in the still, beautiful spring air. Bill's hired hand, on his way to the spring about the middle of the forenoon, met Jim Harkey, who said wickedly in answer to a jocular greeting:-- "Don't give me none of your lip now; we'll break your necks for two cents." The hand came to Bill with the story. "Bill, they're on the fight." "Oh, I guess not." "Well, they be. We better not run up against them to-day if we don't want trouble."