The Iron Furrow | Page 5

three cottonwoods, Ruth Gardner called to him not to
forget his promised visit to their cabins. He assured them he should
remember. When the girls were some distance off, they waved across
the sagebrush at him and he swung his hat in reply. Off then the pair
went at a gallop, with the automobile on the road far south of them
leaving a hazy streamer of dust above the earth; the riders going farther
and farther away, becoming smaller and smaller on the mesa, until at
last they were but bobbing specks in the golden sunshine.
CHAPTER II
As Lee Bryant reined his horse to a stop before the small ranch house, a
man seated on a stool just within the open doorway rose and came out
to join him. He was a man of thin, stooped body; his sandy hair
streaked with gray formed a fringe about his bald crown; and on his
lined, sunburnt face there rested a shadow of worry that appeared to be
habitual. Bryant dismounted and shook hands with the ranchman.
"Well, how are you making it, Mr. Stevenson?" he greeted. "As I
promised if I should be riding by this way again, I've stopped to say
'howdy.' Doesn't seem a month has passed since I stayed over night
with you? How's Mrs. Stevenson? Hope you're both well."
"Just feeling fair, just fair. Glad you stopped, Bryant," was the answer.
"My wife was wondering only the other day what had become of you.
Bring your horse around to the corral."
They went behind the house, where the young man removed saddle and
bridle from Dick and turned him into the enclosure. Stevenson gathered
an armful of hay from a small heap near by and tossed it over the fence
to the horse, which began to eat eagerly. Lee glanced about, gave a
sharp whistle; from the trail by the creek a bark answered him. Then an
Airedale came racing through the sagebrush, now and again leaping
high to gain a view of his master and finally breaking out upon the
clear ground about the ranch house.

"Mike, you're too inquisitive about other animals' dwellings," Lee
addressed him as he arrived, wet from an immersion in the creek and
panting from his run. "Some day a rattler in a hole you're digging into
will nip you on the nose and you'll wish you'd been more polite. Come
along now and be good."
He walked with Stevenson back to the house, where leaving the dog to
drop in the shade outside they entered. The interior was cool and dim
after the hot, glaring sunshine; and Bryant, having greeted Mrs.
Stevenson, sat down gratefully in a rocking-chair, glad to avail himself
of the room's comfort. Crude as an adobe house is both in appearance
and in construction, it is admirably adapted to the climate of the arid
Southwest; its flat dirt roof and thick walls built of sun-baked mud
bricks, plastered within and smoothly surfaced without, defying alike
the heat of midsummer and the icy blasts of winter and lasting in that
dry clime half a century. This ranch house of the Stevensons', originally
built by some Mexican, as Bryant judged, had been standing
twenty-five or thirty years and was still tight and staunch.
"Your creek's pretty dry, I see," the young fellow remarked afteratime,
when they had exchanged news.
"By August there won't be any water in it at all," Stevenson said,
"except a little that always runs in the cañon. I'll have to haul it from
there then. You see now why I can't keep stock here."
His wife stopped the needle with which she mended an apron while
they talked, and looked out of a window. On her face was the same
tired, anxious expression that marked her husband's countenance.
"I've barely kept our garden alive," she said, "but it won't be for much
longer."
"That's too bad, Mrs. Stevenson," Lee Bryant replied. "However, one
can't do anything without water. Still, your sheep are doing well, I
suppose; the grass is good on the mountains this summer."
An answer was not immediately forthcoming from the rancher; he sat

staring absently at the backs of his roughened hands, now and again
rubbing one or the other, and enveloped in a gloom that Bryant could
both see and feel. Then all at once Stevenson began to talk, in a voice
querulous and morose.
"We're going to quit here, sell the sheep, and go back East. I was
swindled when I bought this ranch, and I want to get away before I lose
my last cent. Came out to this country five years ago from Illinois with
forty thousand dollars, and now we're going back with what I can sell
my sheep for, maybe twenty-five hundred cash. Menocal robbed me