Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/42

 felt growing upon him day by day. The senator, a placid, urbane gray gentleman, slender, quick, hearty; his face tinged by a brown tint of sun and wind from his early years in the saddle, the healthy rose of careful living and much open air glowing under it, A man of studied, deliberate speech, exact, mild, generous. Such Barrett remembered Senator Nearing. Incredible that he could turn out in the end to be a dishonest, a heartlessly dishonest, a ruinously dishonest man.

The nucleus of the great Diamond Tail ranch was the Nearing homestead on the shore of the river, where the commodious ranch-house with its village of outbuildings now stood. This original homestead was owned in fee simple by Nearing, as was the practice of all the cattle barons to own a bit of land in the midst of vast, usurped territory belonging to the public domain. Nearing had reserved this homestead out of the pool into which all the rest had been thrown when he organized the cattle company.

The method among the cattle barons of that time was to first locate on some attractive bit of land, such as this homestead by the river, take title to it, and spread from there over as many miles on every side as cupidity might direct or force could control. Boundaries were fixed by mutual agreement among themselves, by hills, mountains, rivers. As in the instance of the Diamond Tail, the southern boundary of which was the little river upon which the home place stood, the eastern a range of distant mountains, and other natural barriers and monuments serving in like capacity elsewhere.