Page:BM Bower - Her Prairie Knight.djvu/122

 and talked for a few minutes. Was there anything so strange about that? And I told him you were leasing the Pine Ridge country, and he looked—well, peculiar. But he wouldn't say anything."

"Well, he had good reason for looking peculiar. But you needn't have told him I did it, Trix. Lay that at milord's door, where it belongs. I don't want Keith to blame me."

"But why should he blame anybody? It isn't his land, is it?"

"No, it isn't. But—you see, Trix, it's this way: A man goes somewhere and buys a ranch—or locates on a claim—and starts into the cattle business. He may not own more than a few hundred acres of land, but if he has much stock he needs miles of prairie country, with water, for them to range on. It's an absolute necessity, you see. He takes care to locate where there is plenty of public land that is free to anybody's cattle.

"Take the Pool outfit, for instance. We don't own land enough to feed one-third of our cattle. We depend on government land for range for them. The Cross outfit is the same, only Keith's is on a smaller scale. He's got to have range outside his own land, which is mostly hay land. This part of 118