“Thinking of those willing boys of yours again, are you?” laughed Bannister. “They’re ce’tainly a heap prevalent with their hardware, but their hunting don’t seem to bring home any meat.” “By the way, how _is_ your ankle, Mr. Bannister? I forgot to ask.” This shot from the young woman. He enjoyed it with internal mirth. “They did happen on the target that time,” he admitted. “Oh, it’s getting along fine, but I aim to do most of my walking on horseback for a while.” They swept past the first dangerous grove of cottonwoods in safety, and rounded the boundary fence corner. “They’re in that bunch of pines over there,” said the foreman, after a single sweep of his eyes in that direction. “Yes, I see they are. You oughtn’t to let your boys wear red bandannas when they go gunning, Miss Messiter. It’s an awful careless habit.” Helen herself could see no sign of life in the group of pines, but she knew their keen, trained eyes had found what hers could not. Riding with one or another of her cowboys, she had often noticed how infallibly they could read the country for miles around. A scattered patch on a distant hillside, though it might be a half-hour’s ride from them, told them a great deal more than seemed possible. To her the dark spots sifted on that slope meant scrub underbrush, if there was any meaning at all in them. But her riders could tell not only whether they were alive, but could differentiate between sheep and cattle. Indeed, McWilliams could nearly always tell whether they were _her_ cattle or not. He was unable to explain to her how he did it. By a sort of instinct, she supposed. The pines were negotiated in safety, and on the part of the men with a carelessness she could not understand. For after they had passed there was a spot between her shoulder-blades that seemed to tingle in expectation of a possible bullet boring its way through. But she would have died rather than let them know how she felt. Perhaps Bannister understood, however, for he remarked casually: “I wouldn’t be ambling past so leisurely if I was riding alone. It makes a heap of difference who your company is, too. Those punchers wouldn’t take a chance at me now for a million dollars.” “No, they’re some haidstrong, but they ain’t plumb locoed,” agreed Mac. Fifteen minutes later Helen drew up at the line corner. “We’ll part company here, Mr. Bannister. I don’t think there is any more danger from my men.” “Before we part there is something I want to say. I hold that a man has as much right to run sheep on these hills as cows. It’s government land, and neither one of us owns it. It’s bound to be a case of the survival of the fittest. If sheep are hardier and more adapted to the country, then cows have got to _vamos_. That’s nature, as it looks to me. The buffalo and the antelope have gone, and I guess cows have got to take their turn.”