Skyrider | Page 5

chance traveler visions the moment you mention southern Arizona, but
if you wanted to ride to the Border from the Rolling R corrals, you
would find the trip a half-day proposition. As to the exact location,
never mind about that.
The Selmer Stock Company had other ranches where they raised other
animals, but the Rolling R raised horses almost exclusively, the few
hundred head of cattle not being counted as a real ranch industry, but
rather an incidental by-product. Rolling R Ranch was the place Sudden
Selmer called home, although there was a bungalow out in the Wilshire
District in Los Angeles about which Sudden would grumble when the
tax notice came in his mail. There was a big touring car in the garage
on the back of the lot, and there was a colored couple who lived in two
rooms of the bungalow for sake of the fire insurance and as a
precaution against thieves, and to keep the lawn watered and clipped
and the dust off the furniture. They admitted that they had a snap, for
they were seldom disturbed in their leisurely caretaking routine save in
the winter. Even Mary V always tired of the place after a month or two
in it, and would pack her trunk and "hit the trail" for the Rolling R.

Speaking of Mary V, you would know that a girl with modern
upbringing lived a good deal at the ranch. You could tell by the low,
green bungalow with wide, screened porches and light cream trim, that
was almost an exact reproduction of the bungalow in Los Angeles. A
man and woman who have lived long together on a ranch like the
Rolling R would have gone on living contentedly in the adobe house
which was now abandoned to the sole occupancy of the boys. It is the
young lady of the family who demands up-to-date housing.
So the bungalow stood there in the glaring sun, surrounded by a scrap
of lawn which the Arizona winds whipped and buffeted with sand and
wind all summer, and vines which the wind tousled into
discouragement. And fifty yards away squatted the old adobe house in
the sand, with a tree at each front corner and a narrow porch extending
from one to the other.
Beyond the adobe, toward the sheltering bluff, a clutter of low sheds,
round-pole corrals, a modern barn of fair size, and beside it a square
corral of planks and stout, new posts, continued the tale of how
progress was joggling the elbow of picturesqueness. Sudden's father
had built the adobe and the oldest sheds and corrals, when he took all
the land he could lawfully hold under government claims. Later he had
bought more; and Sudden, growing up and falling heir to it all, had
added tract after tract by purchase and lease and whatever other devices
a good politician may be able to command.
Sudden's father had been a simple man, content to run his ranch along
the lines of least resistance, and to take what prosperity came to him in
the natural course of events. Sudden had organized a Company, had
commercialized his legacy, had "married money," and had made money.
Far to the north and to the east and west ran the lines of other great
ranches, where sheep were handled in great, blatting bands and yielded
a fortune in wool. There were hills where Selmer cattle were wild as
deer--cattle that never heard the whistle of a locomotive until they were
trailed down to the railroad to market.
These made the money for Selmer and his Company. But it was the
Rolling R, where the profits were smaller, that stood closest to

Sudden's heart. There was not so much money in horses as there was in
sheep; Sudden admitted it readily enough. But he hated sheep; hated
the sound of them and the smell of them and the insipid, questioning
faces of them. And he loved horses; loved the big-jointed, wabbly
legged colts and the round-bodied, anxious mothers; loved the grade
geldings and fillies and the registered stock that he kept close to home
in fenced pastures; loved the broom-tail bronks that ranged far afield
and came in a dust cloud moiling up from their staccato hoof beats,
circled by hoarse, shouting riders seen vaguely through the cloud.
There was a thrill in watching a corral full of wild horses milling round
and round, dodging the whispering ropes that writhed here and there
overhead to settle and draw tight over some unlucky head. There was a
thrill in the taming--more thrills than dollars, for until the war overseas
brought eager buyers, the net profits of the horse ranch would scarcely
have paid for Mary V's clothes and school and what she demurely set
down as "recreation."
But