The Iron Furrow | Page 5

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 ca?on. 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 right at the start, selling me this place for twenty-five thousand--twenty thousand down and a mortgage for the remaining five thousand--when the place was just five thousand acres of sagebrush, with no more water than runs in this creek. I was a tenderfoot all right! The land agent at Kennard showed it to me in June when the Perro was booming, and I believed him when he said it ran that way all the year around. Look at it now!