"I believe I may truthfully say that I understand the uses--and misuses--of injunctions, William. In the East they largely take the place of guns as fighting weapons, and I think I may say without boasting that I can hit the bull's-eye with them as well as most men. But suppose Mr. Brown _uses_ the water? Suppose there is none left to turn back into the creek channel when he is through? He has a large force of men at work running laterals from the main ditch, which carries the water up and over the high land, and I took the liberty of following his lines of stakes. As you would put it, William, he seems about to irrigate the whole of northern Montana; certainly his stakes cover the whole creek bottom, both above and below the main ditch, and also the bench land above." "Hell! Anything else?" "I believe not--except that he has completed his fencing and has turned in a large number of cattle. I say completed, though strictly speaking he has not. He has completed the great field south of the creek and east of us. But Mr. Walland was saying that Brown intends to fence a tract to the north of us, either this fall or early in the spring. I know to a certainty that he has a good many sections leased there. I tried to obtain some of it last spring and could not." Into the voice of Dill had crept a note of discouragement. "Well, don't yuh worry none, Dilly. I'm here to see yuh pull out on top, and you'll do it, too. You're a crackerjack when it comes to the fine points uh business, and I sure savvy the range end uh the game, so between us we ought to make good, don't yuh think? You just keep your eye on Brown, and if yuh can slap him in the face with an injunction or anything, don't yuh get a sudden attack uh politeness and let him slide. I'll look after the cow brutes myself--and if I ain't good for it, after all these years, I ought to be kicked plumb off the earth. The time has gone by when we could ride over there and haze his bunch clear out uh the country on a high lope, with our six guns backing our argument. I kinda wish," he added pensively, "we _hadn't_ got so damn' decent and law-abiding. We could get action a heap more speedy and thorough with a dozen or fifteen buckaroos that liked to fight and had lots uh shells and good hosses. Why, I could have the old man's bunch shoveling dirt into that ditch to beat four aces, in about fifteen minutes, if--" "But, as you say," Dill cut in anxiously, "we are decent and law-abiding, and such a procedure is quite out of the question." "Aw, I ain't meditating no moonlight attack, Dilly--but the boys would sure love to do it if I told 'em to get busy, and I reckon we could make a better job of it than forty-nine injunctions and all kinds uh law sharps."