Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/106

 tain Cattle Company into a receivership for three years and there wouldn't be enough left of it to cut a shoestring out of. That's what he had made plain to them. The one thing to do was give him, Hal Nearing, ex-senator and man of reputation from sea to sea, time to develop his plans, to curb this drain of outlawry, and at least end the whole matter where it had begun.

Every hour's developments confirmed Barrett in his belief that there was something crooked in the inside office. Nearing seemed, through all his indifference over the affair, to resent the killing of the cattle thief.

Barrett knew that Nearing had not turned a hand to help him in that fight; he knew as well as if he had been there, that Nearing's horse had not fallen short in the jump over the arroyo, for the horse hadn't a spot of dust on him, the saddle was clean.

Through that idle, lonesome day, and the idle, lonesome days following it, Barrett pondered these things. The leak that drained the increase of twenty-odd thousand cattle was wide; surely not so easily hidden as to be undiscoverable.

Sticking there at the camp would not accomplish anything. Barrett was seriously considering quitting the job after ten days of it, drawing off a distance, say to Saunders, and quietly taking up his investigation from the outside. He was singularly confirmed in his belief that this was the wisest and best course by no less person than the "poet lariat" of the plains.

It happened while they were playing seven-up under a quaking asp in a little mountain valley not far from camp one morning. Fred Grubb, who was a dry, beetle