Page:Sheep Limit (1928).pdf/47

 direction of Lost Cabin, horse and rider appearing no bigger than a fly.

There was new interest in this movement in the landscape. Imagination, conjecture, leaped across the two or three miles—perhaps more—that lay between, to fix upon the rider, now seen, now lost, as he came on over hill and swale.

The rider seemed to be holding a direct course for the hill on which Rawlins sat. If he had been one of Galloway's fence-riders coming to warn the stranger away from that forbidden territory he could not have ridden a straighter line. Coming right for him, Rawlins thought, feeling a little queer, just as if his telescopic eye had revealed the stranger to him as he rode the fence miles away on the other border.

Rawlins felt the absurdity of such a thought, even while the premonitory crinkling of something like the advance breath of trouble ran through him. He had a feeling of undue prominence on that hill. He felt it was time to be getting on his way.

Down through a tangle of unfamiliar shrubs, which grew ranker on the north side of the hills than the south, Rawlins hastened toward the fence, curious to get a closer sight of the rider. Clemmons had given the fence-guards a hard name. It would be interesting to see whether a man so employed in the service of oppression would carry the arrogance of his delegated authority in his face.

Green greasewood stood high among the grey sage at the foot of the hill, so rank and thick the fence was hidden. Rawlins pushed along through it, breaking out suddenly into a promising little glade, which the