He lifted his hat from his thick brown hair and gave her a courtly bow that left her furiously stamping her foot and gritting her teeth at him as he galloped away, headed north to the Box S Range that lay along Bad Cañon Creek, between Lodgepole Basin and Trout Creek where the sheep had entered. That the trail led homeward as well never once occurred to Isabelle, who saw him going foolhardily to place his head in the jaws of the lion that roared for his bones to crunch; in other words, to fight on their own ground Peterson and his crowd that had boasted how they would get him. “She’ll do me the favor to be thinking of me now,” said Patrick O’Neill to himself, though he never once looked back. CHAPTER V. PLOTTERS AT WORK. As the valley of the Stillwater River—so named because of its swiftness—approaches the high Rockies, it is divided into many sections by the streams that go rushing down to join the larger river; so that the valley resembles a giant hand with outstretched fingers pointing toward the higher peaks to the westward. Each branch bears a name which grew out of its most conspicuous characteristic, and little timber grows in the valley but crowds close to the base of the mountains. So the broad plateaus that lie between the tributaries of the Stillwater make wonderful grazing ground, while the creeks running down the cañons are bordered with willows and quaking aspen groves that give shelter to the cattle and horses that tread down the trails from higher ground to water. Before the national forest reserve brought this fine cattle country under its supervision and allotted to each settler certain well-defined grazing grounds for which he must pay an annual fee based upon the number of animals which feed thereon, Stillwater Valley saw many a range battle waged between rival ranchers. Now that the national forest service held all the range—or at least the best of it next the mountains—the fight went much the same, except that the policing of the forest injected a new factor into the struggle. Isabelle Boyce was right, and Ranger Cushman also summed up the situation rather accurately. The stockmen were ready to fly at each other’s throats for little cause, but they stood as one man against the forest service. “And it’s man by man that I must take them and make them see sense, if I have to crowd it down the throats of them with my fist!” mused Patrick O’Neill, as he reined his horse into the trail that led with steep and devious turnings down into Bad Cañon, which he must cross in order to reach Peterson’s home ranch.