"And that's all a lawyer knows!" said his wife. "Why, you old silly, don't you see that she couldn't have given it to him any other way—with all those people in the room? Clyde Burnaby can think about as fast as anybody I know."
CHAPTER IV
Casey Dunne pulled a fretful buckskin to a halt as he topped a rise and looked down on Talapus Ranch. It lay before him, the thousand-odd acres of it, lush and green beneath the sloping, afternoon sun, an oasis in a setting of brown, baked earth and short, dry grasses which seldom felt the magic of the rains. The ranch was owned by Donald McCrae, a pioneer of the district, and it was the show place of the country. It was Exhibit A to incomers, a witness to the results of irrigation. The broad, fat acres were almost level. There was no waste land, no coulées, no barren hills to discount its value. Every foot of it could be irrigated, and most of it was actually irrigated and cultivated.
Dunne's eye followed the lines of the ditches, marked by margins of green willows. They cut through the fields of wheat, of oats, of alfalfa, timothy, and red clover. They were the main arteries. From them branched veins supplying the fields with the water that gave them life—the water without which the land was waste and barren; but with which it bore marvellously with the stored fertility of fallow centuries. Away at one end of the ranch, sheltered to north and west by low hills, was the ranch house itself, surrounded by young orchards, the stables, the corrals, the granaries, the cattle sheds, tool and implement houses. At that distance, in the clear, dry air, they looked like toys, miniatures, sharply defined in angle and shadow. So, too, the stock grazing in the fields were of lilliputian dimensions.
From where he sat in the saddle Dunne could see the Coldstream, scarcely more than a large creek, dignified in that land of dryness by the name of river, whose source was in the great green glaciers and everlasting snows of the hills. Its banks were green with willow and cottonwood. It was a treasure stream of untold value. With it the land prospered; without it the land and the men who peopled the land must fail.
"And that ranch, and others like it," Dunne muttered through his teeth, "must go dry and back to brown prairie unless the owners sell out to that old holdup, York, at his own price. Well, Mr. York——You yellow devil!"
The last words did not refer to Cromwell York. For, without provocation or preliminaries, the buckskin's head had dived between his legs, his back arched like an indignant cat's, and with a vicious squeal he began to pitch.
Dunne drew his quirt and let him have it. The brown, plaited leather played like lightning on quarters, flanks, cached head, and flattened ears.
"No work, and a bellyful of oats three times a day!" he gritted. "Forgotten who's your boss, hey? I'll show you, you hammer-headed, saffron-hided——"
"Stay with him, Casey!"