As they sat round the little fire the girl handed Harris the paper Slade had given her. It was a scrawled bill of sale calling for three hundred odd head of Circle P cows, listed in the exact numbers of all ages and sexes. In return she would send him an exchange slip for the same number of Three Bar stock. This exchange system was one of Slade's own devising, intended to eliminate the time and expense of sending riders to scour adjacent ranges in search of drifted stock. Each outfit exchanged slips based on the round-up tally with every other brand and so could show bill of sale for off-brand stuff in their beef shipments or for any rebrands on the range. "This labor-saving device is Slade's trump card," Harris said. "It works all his way. We couldn't turn in a false report. But he has three crews covering his range, each under a different wagon foreman and no one of them wise to what the rest are doing. It's only the foremen that jot down the daily tallies and keep the final score. Even if they talked among themselves, why, they're all riding for Slade's brand--and there you are." Deane was regarding the penciled memorandum signed by Slade. "Not a very impressive document," he observed. Harris laughed at the other's evident disapproval of such a slipshod method of property transfer. "Not very," he agreed. "But it's absolutely good. You could borrow money against that at the bank. He doesn't get us that way but here's how he does: He's mapped out a rebrand system. His rebrand is Triangle on the hip. When he gets our exchange slip all he has to do is go on his range and run the Triangle on the hip of the number of Three Bar stock it calls for. There are Three Bar cows ranging a hundred miles from here, just as there's brands a hundred miles off whose stock turns up here--with a Triangle on the hip. Who's going to check Slade up? It would take three crews to cover his range and tally the fresh Three Bar rebrands of this one season--a few here and a few there. He ships trainloads of cows in a year. There's some old rebrands in each lot, say; maybe more than last year's exchange. Well he simply has been holding them over. He can easy explain that. It would break a small outfit to hire enough hands to cover his range and check him up--and he'd buy part of those. The albino's men are petty-larceny bandits compared with Slade." Deane turned to the girl. "Billie, why don't you get out of a game where everything is crooked--a game of who can steal the most and every man for himself?" he asked. "Why don't you fold your hands and give up your business the first thing that goes wrong?" she countered. "Instead of trying to remedy it?" "But you don't have to do it," he urged. "Neither do you," she said. "I've the same pride in the Three Bar that you have in anything you've helped build up. You'd fight all the harder for one of your schemes that was hard-pressed--and so would I."