It will last ten years or more. You see this government buyin’ of beef fer Indians on the reservations, an’ thousands more thet must be counted in as time goes on, will furnish a market thet rustlers cain’t resist an’ cattlemen cain’t stop fer a long time. Then there’s the railroads. It ain’t no hell of a drive to Dodge from heah or Las Animas either. The longer the drive the shorer the market…. An’ there it is, Ripple, all in a nutshell.”

“So help me heaven, you are right!” ejaculated the rancher, in concern. “Hey-day of the rustler! … Britt, with your usual perspicuity you have seen ahead to an unprecedented and dubious future for the cattleman who operates on a large scale…. All right, suh! If you see that clearly you will be equal to meetin’ such a situation when it comes. I’ll never see it, worse luck. But Holly will be in the thick of it—perhaps unmarried. That freezes me inside…. Britt, you’ve been Texas Ranger and Trail Driver, both of which callings, peculiar to the great Lone Star State, should fit you to deal with bad men at a bad time. You have always been a genius handlin’ cowboys…. How do you aim to meet this situation?”

“Wal, I’ll admit thet’s been a stumper,” replied Britt, with a dry laugh.

It was something he had pondered over during many a lonely ride on the range and many an hour in the darkness of the bunkhouse while the wind moaned in the cedar trees outside.

Britt gazed thoughtfully down over the green-gray terraces to the far ribbon of silver meandering across the plains to blue obscurity, and he knew that that scene was good, always soothing and strengthening to the lover of the open. He always looked to this southward scene when the one to the westward had given rise, as now, to a troubled mind. He loved the spur of cedared ground from which this unparalleled view lay open, and likewise he loved the gray escarpment walls as they widened and heightened toward the plain below, and the aloof mesas and the sandy arroyos and the dark canyons, and all that wild and rugged beauty which at length softened into the vast blue prairie. But even if this eastern steppe of New Mexico had not been inspiring and all-satisfying, Britt would have loved it for Holly Ripple’s sake.

When he looked back at the cattle empire, however, he was actuated by mingled feelings of pride, of achievement, of dismay, and over all a sense of fatality in the sublime reach and sweep of the range. The insulating mountains might temper the winter winds and send down never-failing streams upon the grazing lands, and protect the rich bunch-grass and gramina-grass which were so fattening for the herds, but no rock walls could ever keep out the parasites of the rangeland. For a cattleman that scene had a pastoral and intimate beauty wholly dissociated from the wilder one to the south. A hundred thousand cattle dotted the endless pastures. A winding yellow road led down to San Marcos, a green circle of foliage from which the white and gray houses of the town gleamed in the spring sunlight. Far across and leagues away showed the dark patch that was Fort Union. Lincoln was a tiny speck in the distance. But northward the red spot which marked Santa Fe shone plainly over a hundred miles away. With its color and legend of three centuries of occupancy by the dons and padres it had power to cover this broad land with the drowsy languorous atmosphere of the Spaniards.

But all that had only a momentary charm for Britt. With his hawk-eyes he was seeing the deeds of the day at hand. San Marcos would lose the sleepy tenor of its way. The saloon, the dance-hall, the gambling den would soon ring with the revelry attendant upon the pay-day of the cow-hand. Half-nude girls with pretty faces and shadowy eyes and hollow laughs would waylay the range-rider upon his infrequent visit to town. Pale-visaged and thin-lipped gamblers, with their broadcloth frock-coats and wide-brimmed, flat-crowned hats, would shuffle their cards with marvelous dexterity of long, slim, white hands.