Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/130

 "It sounds good, Fred, and I don't doubt we'd be in our rights, but it would mean a fight to hold the land, we'd be outcast and branded, the hand of every cowman on the range would be against us."

"Let 'em come, damn 'em all! I've saved up wrath enough in the days of my life to last me a long time with them cattle barons! They're spraddlin' out over this country like they're bigger'n the Almighty, bluffin' out honest men that'd make homes here and plow up the land and turn it into something. Killin' 'em off sometimes, burnin' 'em out and drivin' 'em on. I think one of the lowest tricks a man ever done was to let them two boys from Iowa put up that house and fence their land, and spend all that money and do work worth hundreds of any man's money the way Hal Nearing did, and then run 'em off."

"That was a kind of a low-down trick."

"Of course, a feller with money in the Diamond Tail might hang back on goin' into a thing that'd look like cuttin' off his own nose, for if two nesters stuck it out in that valley more of 'em would come. It's the best grazin' on this range, and a man with money in the Diamond Tail"

"It's already gone to hell!" said Barrett, with the bitterness of a man robbed by a friend.

Fred Grubb rode a little while again in his reflective way of silence. Then:

"If a man with money in the Diamond Tail was right on the spot to watch the last jackpot he might step up with his gun in his hand and git some of it back when the crooks went to cash in, Ed."