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 still considered continuing on to that place. It would be the community center of those widely separated ranches, the place where information might be secured relative to sheep and land. Not that anything he might learn there would alter the fact of Senator Galloway's fence. That was there, right beside him. It gave him a jolt, Rawlins admitted, to find it dividing him from that white spot on the map by which he had plotted his first scheme. But it was there, and the man who put it there had the power to keep it there, against the demands of thirsty flockmasters and home-seekers from afar.

Lost Cabin lay on the western boundary of this fenced domain, Clemmons had said, the way to the town from his location being almost fifty miles around. The town, having been there first, had been granted an outlet by the imperious land-eater, the flockmaster said. But the senator had run his barbed wire on three sides of it, leaving it sitting in an indenture on his western frontier.

Fine business, thought Rawlins, viewing the fence with growing indignation, to allow one man to grab and hold such a big fistful of the public domain.

The hour was early in the morning, the sun not more than a span from the hilltops, for Clemmons had roused his guest at dawn to share his coffee and bacon. A sheep-herder, the old man explained, must get his flock out while the dew was on the herbage. They would not leave the bedding-ground without the herder; they had been bred to a dependence upon man that seemed to deepen with each succeeding generation. Much more the old flockmaster had told the adven-