"But you are from Texas?"
Was Rennie watching him too intently? No, he must ride a tighter rein on his imagination. There was no reason in the wide world why Don Cazar should expect him to be anyone except Drew Kirby.
"Yes, suh. Didn't have anythin' to go back to there. Thought I'd try for a new start out here." There was the story of several thousand veterans. Rennie should have heard it a good many times already.
"Well, come and try some blue-grass training on our colts. And should you let this stud of yours run with a picked manada of mares, I could promise good fees."[pg 059]
"Suppose I said yes if the fees were some of the foals—of my own choosing, suh?" Drew asked.
Rennie ran a finger across the brand which scarred the gray's hide. "Spur R—that's a new one to me."
"My own. Heard tell as how there's a custom of the country that a slick this old can be branded and claimed by anyone bringing him in. I wasn't going to lose him that way should he do any straying, accidental or intentional."
Don Cazar laughed. "That's using your head, Kirby. All right. It's a deal as far as I'm concerned. You draw wrangler's pay and take stud fees in foals—say one in three, your choosing. Register that brand of yours with Don Lorenzo to be on the safe side. Then you're welcome to run Spur R with the Double R on the Range."
He held out his hand, and Drew grasped it for a quick shake to seal their agreement. He was committed now—to the Range and to a small partnership with its master. But he still wondered if he had made the right choice.
Two days later he dropped bedroll and saddlebags on the spare bunk at one end of the long adobe-walled room and studied his surroundings with deep curiosity. It was a fort, all right, this whole stronghold of Rennie's—not just the bunkhouse which formed part of a side wall. Bunkhouse, feed store, and storage room, blacksmith shop, cookhouse, stables, main house, the quarters for the married men and their families—all arranged to enclose a patio into which choice stock could be herded at the time of an attack, with a curbed well in the center.