“Doggerel nothing. Every one of ’em is a range classic. I got them from old Sam Yerby, who brought them up from Texas. I’ve been giving you the genuwine, blown-in-the-bottle ballads of the man who wears leathers,” defended Larry. “Who is boss of the round-up this year?” asked Mrs. Flanders. “Rowan is, and believe me he worked us to a fare-you-well. He’s some driver, Mac is; one of your sixty-horsepower dynamos on two legs. He is good for twenty-four hours a day himself, and he figures the rest of us are made of leather and steel, too. I’m a wreck.” “What’s that I hear about Falkner and Tait having some more trouble?” “Trouble is right, Mrs. Flanders. They met over by the creek at Three Willows. One thing led to another, and they both got down from their horses and mixed it. Tait had one of his herders with him, and he took a hand in the fracas. The two of them gave Falkner an awful beating. He was just able to crawl to his horse.” “Tait ought to be driven out of the country,” pronounced Mrs. Flanders indignantly. “He’s always making trouble.” “Joe is certainly a bad actor, but it would be some job to drive him away. He hasn’t got sense enough to realize what is going to happen to him. If Falkner ever gets him at the wrong end of a gun——” He left his sentence unfinished. The imagination could supply the rest. “They say Tait has driven his sheep across the dead line again.” Mrs. Flanders put her statement as if it were a question. Larry, recalling a warning he had been given, became suddenly discreet. “Do they?” “Will the Hill Creek cattlemen stand for it?” There was a sullen, mulish look on his face that suggested he knew more than he intended to tell. “Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t.” Business called the Mistress of Elkhorn Lodge into the house. Ruth, with a slant of dark eyes toward her guest, asked him a question: “Do you call this two weeks?” “I call it a month, reckoning by my feelings.” She scoffed. “It’s a pity about your feelings. I told you not to come again for two weeks.” “I thought as I happened to be passing——” “On your way to nowhere.” “—that I’d drop in and say ‘_Buenas tardes_.’” “Good of you, I’m sure.” He settled himself comfortably on the porch against a pillar. “I want to ask your advice. I’m just a plain cow-puncher and you’re a wise young lady from a city. So you can tell me all about it. I’m getting old and lonesome, and my mind has been running on a girl a heap.” Her glance took in the slim, wiry youth at her feet. She smiled. “You’d better ask Mrs. Flanders. I’m too young to advise you.”