"Yes; seven or eight of them stayed behind to look after the horses--eight with the marshal, he's one of the outfit." "Did them fellers rope you and drag you away out here?" Stilwell inquired, leaning over in the tensity of his feeling, his tanned face growing pale, as if the thought of such atrocity turned his blood cold. "They hitched me to a freight train. The rope broke at the river." The rancher turned to his son again, making a motion with open hand outflung as if displaying evidence in some controversy between them that clinched it on his side without another word. The younger man came a step nearer Morgan's couch, where he stood with grave face, hesitant, as if something came forward in his mind to speak. The elder strode to the door and looked out into the sun of early morning, and the cool shadows of the cottonwood trees at the riverside which reached almost to his walls. "To a train! God A'mighty--to a train!" Morgan heard him say. "How far is it from Ascalon to the river?" Morgan asked. "Over two miles! And your hands tied--God A'mighty!" "You take it easy, they'll not leave Ascalon till Sol Drumm, their boss, comes back from Kansas City," the young man said. "We're layin' for him ourselves, we've got a bill against him." "And we've got about as much show to collect it as we have to dip a hatful of stars out of the river," Stilwell said, turning gloomily from the door. "We'll see about that!" the younger one returned, in high and defiant stubbornness. "We've already lost upwards of five hundred head of stock from that feller's trespass on our range," Stilwell explained. "That gang drove in here three weeks ago to rest and feed up for market, payin' no attention to anybody's range or anybody's warning to keep off. They had the men with them to go where they pleased. Them Texas cattle come up here loaded with fever ticks, and the bite of them little bugs means death to a northern herd. They sowed ticks all over my range. I'm still a losin' cattle, and Lord knows where it will stop." "You've been working to get a quarantine law passed, I remember," Morgan said, feeling this outrage as if the cattle were his own. "Yes, but Congress is asleep, and them fellers down in Texas never shut their eyes. I warned Drumm to keep off my range, asked him first like a gentleman, but he drove in one night between my pickets and mixed his poison cattle with mine out of pure cussidness. He claimed they got away, and him with fifteen or twenty men to ride herd! It's cost me ten thousand dollars, at the lowest figure, already, and more goin'. It looks like it would clean me out." "You ought to have some recourse against him in law," Morgan said.