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 for his conduct. Or, as you say, raised merry hell." Von Tromp sped a quizzical glance at Original. "But supposing, Blunt, certain people we need not mention, finding no relief from the courts, and their property being daily diminished by the rustlers and the pirating of the sheepmen upon the range rightfully theirs, should decide to take the law into their own hands—to make an example, you might say. Supposing it became speedily known that the agents of these outraged property holders intended to make no distinction between actual rustlers who steal cattle and piratical sheepmen who steal the range."

"You mean clean up the country?" Original asked.

"That 's a neat way of putting it," his visitor smiled. Original honed his stubbled jaw reflectively. He was of the cattle clan; its chivalry, its wild free code had been born in him; all the years of his life he had supported that clan's interests with fanatical devotion. With every other of his kind in the Big Country, Original had bitterly resented the invasion of the range by the low-caste homesteader and the woolly avalanche of the sheep; the