The Settling of the Sage | Page 3

it was the squatter who should move, and on
this principle they grimly rested.
Cal Warren had been the vanguard of each new rush of settlers that had
pushed Bill Harris on to another range, and the cowman had come to
see the hand of fate in this persistence. The nesters streamed westward
on all the trails, filing their rights on the fertile valleys and pushing
those who would be cattle barons undisputed back into the more arid
regions. When the Warren family found him out again and halted their
white-topped wagon before his door, Bill Harris gave it up.
"I've come up to see about getting that partnership fixed up, Bill,"
Warren greeted. "You know--the one we talked over in Dodge a while
ago, about our going in together when either of us changed his mind.
Well, I've changed mine. I've come to see that running cows is a good
game, Bill, so let's fix it up. I've changed my mind."
"That was twenty years ago, Cal," Harris said. "But it still holds
good--only I've changed my mind too. You was dead right from the

first. Squatters will come to roost on every foot of ground and there'll
come a day when I'll have to turn squatter myself--so I might as well
start now. The way to get used to crowds, Cal, is to go where the
crowds are at. I'm headed back for Kansas and you better come along.
We'll get that partnership fixed up."
A single child had come to bless each union in the parents' late middle
age. The Harris heir, a boy of eight, had been named Calvin in honor of
his father's friend. Cal Warren had as nearly returned the compliment as
circumstances would permit, and his three-year-old daughter bore the
name of Williamette Ann for both father and mother of the boy who
was his namesake, and Warren styled her Billie for short.
Each man was as stubbornly set in his new views as he had been in the
old. The Harrises came into possession of the Warrens' prairie schooner
and drove off to the east. The Warrens took over the Three Bar brand
and the little Williamette Ann slept in the tiny bunk built for the son of
the Harris household.
For a space of minutes these old pictures occupied the mind of the man
on the pinto horse. The led buckskin moved fretfully and tugged on the
lead rope, rousing the man from his abstraction. Distant strings of
prairie schooners and ox-bows faded from his mind's eye and he way
once more conscious of the red steer with the Three Bar brand that had
stirred up the train of reflections. He turned for another glimpse of the
distant sign as he headed the paint-horse along the road.
"All that was quite a spell back, Calico," he said. "Old Bill Harris
planted the first one of those signs, and it served a good purpose then.
It's a sign that stands for lack of progress to-day. Times change, and it's
been eighteen years or so since old Bill Harris left."
The road traversed the bench, angled down a side hill to a valley
somewhat more than a mile across. Calico pricked his ears sharply
toward the Three Bar buildings that stood at the upper end of it.
Curious eyes peered from the bunk house as he neared it, for the
paint-horse and the buckskin were not without fame even if the man

himself were a stranger to them all. For the better part of a year the two
high-colored horses had been seen on the range,--south to the railroad,
west to the Idaho line. The man had kept to himself and when seen by
approaching riders he had always been angling on a course that would
miss their own. Those who had, out of curiosity, deliberately ridden out
to intercept him reported that he seemed a decent sort of citizen, willing
to converse on any known topics except those which concerned
himself.
He dropped from the saddle before the bunk house and as he stood in
the door he noted half a dozen men lounging on the bunks. This
indolence apprised him of the fact that they were extra men signed on
for the summer season and that their pay had not yet started, for the
cowhand, when on the pay roll, works sixteen hours daily and when he
rests or frolics it is, except in rare instances, on his own time and at his
own expense.
A tall, lean individual, who sat cross-legged on a bunk, engaged in
mending a spur strap, was the first to answer his inquiry for the
foreman.
"Billie Warren is the big he-coon of the Three Bar," he informed.
"You'll likely find the boss at the blacksmith shop." The