When he had finished that job and the Bar B steers were plodding in the dark to find another bed ground on Picket Pin, Patrick O’Neill cautiously lighted a match in the crown of his hat and looked at his watch. “Eight o’clock and our work only begun! Get away from here, Morenci, and show the stuff that’s in you!” And striking into a cow path that wound through thickets of aspen and across little open glades, he pelted away up Castle Creek to the steep trail where the rim rock broke down in a great slide of boulders on the divide between Myers Creek and Castle. When he reached Lodgepole Basin, his watch said ten o’clock and Ranger O’Neill had a deep crease between his eyebrows, for Morenci was wet to his ears—and that not from splashing through creeks, though he had crossed two—and there were more cattle to be moved. But these were Peterson’s and Ranger O’Neill was not so gentle. Across Lodgepole Basin, he galloped, to where a hundred head or more of Box S cattle ranged happily enough and had for their bed ground a knoll not far from Squaw Gulch, which was not very distant from the Myers Creek divide. For the Stillwater Forest Reserve, you must know, is a network of streams and their cañons, once you are back in the hills. So Ranger O’Neill made a hasty gathering of Peterson’s cattle and hazed them along at a lumbering gallop to the fenced gap in the rim rock and so down into the Castle Creek pasture which was leased to Boyce. Just for good measure he rode after them and threw a hastily gathered rock or two, and the cattle went down the creek as if a full crew rode hard at their heels. Ranger O’Neill pulled up and listened until the last sound of whipping brush and the clicking of cloven feet against the rocks had died to silence. The cattle were tired after that headlong drive up Myers Creek to the rim. It had been steep in places and only the manner in which he had rushed them along had held them to the trail. Morenci was standing with his feet slightly braced—the mark of a tired horse—and his flanks palpitating with exhaustion. O’Neill listened while the horse caught his wind, then suddenly he leaned forward and gave the reeking neck a grateful slap. “Not a dozen horses in the district could have done it, and that’s the truth, Morenci!” Then he fell silent, though his thoughts went on quite as definitely as if he were actually speaking them.