Page:Sheep Limit (1928).pdf/182

 the charred pieces of bacon as if he intended to throw them like dice and read his fortune, emptied them into the stewpan and reached around for his can of beans.

"Eatin' out of a pan, like a dog," he said, lifting his reproachful eyes, his one-time trim and elegant moustache looking ragged and cindery, a growth of reddish, cow-colored beard on his gaunt cheeks and chin, his hair long around his ears. "No, she didn't foller me, Rawlins. She rode over to a ranch where they've got a telephone and called up the sheriff down at Jasper. She told him to arrest a man ridin' such and such a horse with her brand on it, and let it go at that."

"Oh, I see."

"Yeh. She made out she didn't know it was me on that horse. When she come after that blamed skate I was peekin' through them bars. 'Oh, it's my husband,' she says, when the sheriff led her in to take a squint at the thief. 'I thought he was out on the range with a band of sheep. Let him go, Mr. Sheriff—it's my mistake.' That's what she had the gall to do."

"That's hard sleddin', Peck. But it was a pretty shrewd way of keeping a husband; you'll have to hand her that."

"Yeah, took all the money—my own personal, private money—the sheriff frisked off of me, and wouldn't give me back a cent. She said I could either come back here and go to work, or go to the pen for stealin' that horse. It was a bluff, but it worked. I didn't know the law then, but I know it now, and if I could lay my hand on anything else around that ranch I'd show her! Riley—you know Riley, the lawyer that's herdin' for her? Riley he told me the law. A