Homesteaders who did not know the conditions drifted there on the westward-mounting wave, only to be hustled rudely away, or to pay the penalty of refusal with their lives. Reasons were not given, rights were not pleaded by the lords of many herds. They had the might to work their will; that was enough. So it could be understood what indignation mounted in the breast of tough old Saul Chadron when a pigmy homesteader put his firm feet down on the ground and refused to move along at his command, and even fought back to maintain what he claimed to be his rights. It was an unprecedented stand, a dangerous example. But this nester had held out for more than two years against his forces, armed by some invisible strength, it seemed, guarded against ambuscades and surprises by some cunning sense which led him whole and secure about his nefarious ways. Not alone that, but other homesteaders had come and settled near him across the river on two other big ranches which cornered there against Chadron's own. These nesters drew courage from Macdonald's example, and cunning from his counsel, and stood against the warnings, persecutions, and attempts at forceful dislodgment. The law of might did not seem to apply to them, and there was no other source equal to the dignity of the Drovers' Association--at least none to which it cared to carry its grievances and air them. So they cut Alan Macdonald's fences, and other homesteaders' fences, in the night and drove a thousand or two cattle across his fields, trampling the growing grain and forage into the earth; they persecuted him in a score of harassing, quick, and hidden blows. But this homesteader was not to be driven away by ordinary means. Nature seemed to lend a hand to him, he made crops in spite of the cattlemen, and was prospering. He had taken root and appeared determined to remain, and the others were taking deep root with him, and the free, wide range was coming under the menace of the fence and the lowly plow. That was the condition of things in those fair autumn days when Prances Landcraft returned to the post. The Drovers' Association, and especially the president of it, was being defied in that section, where probably a hundred homesteaders had settled with their families of long-backed sons and daughters. They were but a speck on the land yet, as Chadron had told the smoky stranger when he had engaged him to try his hand at throwing the "holy scare." But they spread far over the upland plain, having sought the most favored spots, and they were a blight and a pest in the eyes of the cattlemen.