Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/58

 "Burned their damned shacks over their heads!" said Nearing, dispassionately, nodding in confirmation.

To him the destruction and terror carried by his men to these humble lodgments of the poor involved no deeper question of right and justice than smoking wolves from their dens among the rocks.

"Wasn't it a little rough on the poor devils?" Barrett ventured.

"They can hitch up and go on," Nearing explained. "We always leave them their teams. They're a bad outfit; most of them ought to be shot."

"Where do they go?" Barrett inquired, unable to put aside out of his mind the picture of poignant desolation which the cattleman's few unfeeling words had conjured up.

"We don't bother with them as long as they don't light again on the Diamond Tail."

Nearing took his feet from the railing, turned to face his young guest with slow, impressive movement, portentous of some important disclosure.

"We'd have been on our feet, paying dividends as expected, and rightly expected of us, Ed, in spite of the calamity of drouth and hard winters, if it hadn't been for the infernal damned thieves—rustlers, we call them out here."

"I've heard of them," Barrett said.

"It's become a business up here in the Northwest, as systematically organized, I tell you, Barrett, as any business in the country. The increase of our herd, that ought to go to pay dividends, melts away like snow on the mountains. We couldn't pay more than sixty cents