Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/64

 Contrarily, it only emphasized the feeling of foolish rashness and inadequacy that oppressed Barrett in hot, overwhelming conviction.

"A man must know the range like a book," said Nearing, "not for a matter of a few square miles, but hundreds of square miles; every arroyo, every wooded canyon, every cave in the hills. It would take a hundred sheriffs, every one of them up on the country like a range man, to cover this county alone. You can begin to guess, then, what kind of a job is cut out for me with forty-five cowboys that have to divide their attention between cattle and rustlers."

"I'm beginning to see," Barrett humbly confessed.

"You'd have to ride the range a year, maybe two years, all depending on how you took to it, before you'd be safe alone five miles away from camp. You'd think it an easy matter to track a bunch of cattle run off by rustlers, I expect that's running through your head right now. But they don't drive them off in bunches, they split them up in threes, fives, seldom more than tens, assemble them miles away in the mountains where a coyote couldn't pick up a week-old trail. They drive them over to the Black Hills and split 'em up again. The ingenuity of the devil's in them! If they applied as much thought and craft to business out in the open, they'd skin the world."

Nearing had regained his usual calm, the whirlwind of his perturbation seemed stilled, outwardly at least. What turmoil surged within his breast no man might read in the steady, low-modulated voice, the easy bearing, the carefree laugh with which he now and then