Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/59

 on the dollar if every beef on the ranch was sold today. That infernal damned gang of rustlers keeps us robbed to the bone!"

"That is one phase of it that I can't understand," Barrett frankly admitted.

"Understand!" bitterly, "I tell you it's an organized industry, with ramifications in every big market in the middle-west."

"How they can keep it up, in such volume as to cut the revenues of a big enterprise like this, I mean. I can see well enough how they might pick up a few dozen head a year, even a hundred or two, but"

Nearing laid his hand on the young man's knee, leaned forward a little to impress his words.

"Take one little sheriff, and him not an overly honest one, always, to a county that's as big as New Hampshire, with thousands of cattle spread on its plains and mountains, and figure to yourself where he's going to begin to patrol it."

"Yes, and at the same time take the hundreds of cowboys and ranchers—what are they doing to let this thing grow and sap their herds?"

"No man knows who's a thief in this country," said Nearing, with the desperation of a man honestly and entirely baffled. "I've got as trustworthy a bunch on the Diamond Tail as ever rode leather, I think, but the leak goes on in spite of our vigilance."

"The loss must run into hundreds in the course of a year, to cut"

"Between three and four thousand head the last two years!"