The Quirt | Page 3

out to Frank, he was perfectly willing to
support Minnie and the kids if they came back where he could have a
chance. He wrote this painstakingly to the lawyer and received no reply.
Later he learned from Minnie that she had freed herself from him, and
that she was keeping boarders and asking no odds of him.
To come at once to the end of Brit's matrimonial affairs, he heard from
the children once in a year, perhaps, after they were old enough to write.
He did not send them money, because he seemed never to have any
money to send, and because they did not ask for any. Dumbly he
sensed, as their handwriting and their spelling improved, that his
children were growing up. But when he thought of them they seemed
remote, prattling youngsters whom Minnie was forever worrying over
and who seemed to have been always under the heels of his horse, or
under the wheels of his wagon, or playing with the pitchfork, or
wandering off into the sage while he and their distracted mother
searched for them. For a long while--how many years Brit could not
remember--they had been living in Los Angeles. Prospering, too, Brit
understood. The girl, Lorraine--Minnie had wanted fancy names for the
kids, and Brit apologized whenever he spoke of them, which was
seldom--Lorraine had written that "Mamma has an apartment house."
That had sounded prosperous, even at the beginning. And as the years
passed and their address remained the same, Brit became fixed in the
belief that the Casa Grande was all that its name implied, and perhaps

more. Minnie must be getting rich. She had a picture of the place on the
stationery which Lorraine used when she wrote him. There were two
palm trees in front, with bay windows behind them, and pillars. Brit
used to study these magnificences and thank God that Minnie was
doing so well. He never could have given her a home like that. Brit
sometimes added that he had never been cut out for a married man,
anyway.
Old-timers forgot that Brit had ever been married, and late comers
never heard of it. To all intents the owners of the Quirt outfit were old
bachelors who kept pretty much to themselves, went to town only when
they needed supplies, rode old, narrow-fork saddles and grinned
scornfully at "swell-forks" and "buckin'-rolls," and listened to all the
range gossip without adding so much as an opinion. They never talked
politics nor told which candidates received their two votes. They kept
the same two men season after season,--leathery old range hands with
eyes that saw whatever came within their field of vision, and with the
gift of silence, which is rare.
If you know anything at all about cattlemen, you will know that the
Quirt was a poor man's ranch, when I tell you that Hunter and Johnson
milked three cows and made butter, fed a few pigs on the skim milk
and the alfalfa stalks which the saddle horses and the cows disdained to
eat, kept a flock of chickens, and sold what butter, eggs and pork they
did not need for themselves. Cattlemen seldom do that. More often they
buy milk in small tin cans, butter in "squares," and do without eggs.
Four of a kind were the men of the TJ up-and-down, and even Bill
Warfield--president and general manager of the Sawtooth Cattle
Company, and of the Federal Reclamation Company and several other
companies, State senator and general benefactor of the Sawtooth
country--even the great Bill Warfield lifted his hat to the owners of the
Quirt when he met them, and spoke of them as "the finest specimens of
our old, fast-vanishing type of range men." Senator Warfield himself
represented the modern type of range man and was proud of his
progressiveness. Never a scheme for the country's development was
hatched but you would find Senator Warfield closely allied with it, his

voice the deciding one when policies and progress were being
discussed.
As to the Sawtooth, forty thousand acres comprised their holdings
under patents, deeds and long-time leases from the government.
Another twenty thousand acres they had access to through the grace of
the owners, and there was forest-reserve grazing besides, which the
Sawtooth could have if it chose to pay the nominal rental sum. The
Quirt ranch was almost surrounded by Sawtooth land of one sort or
another, though there was scant grazing in the early spring on the
sagebrush wilderness to the south. This needed Quirt Creek for
accessible water, and Quirt Creek, save where it ran through cut-bank
hills, was fenced within the section and a half of the TJ up-and-down.
So there they were, small fish making shift to live precariously with
other small fish in a pool where