The Ranch at the Wolverine

by B. M. Bower

He laughed ruefully. "Horatio! It certainly does cost something, though. I've certainly paid enough—"

"In worry, maybe. The calves may not be absolutely lost, you know. Why, I lost a big steer last spring and never found him till I was going to sell a few head. Then he turned up, the biggest and fattest one in the bunch. You can't tell; they get themselves in queer places sometimes. I'll come over to-morrow, if I can, and take a look at that pasture and all around. And I'll keep a good lookout for the calves."

Many men would have objected to the unconscious patronage of her tone. That Charlie Fox did not, but accepted the spirit of helpfulness in her words, lifted him out of the small-natured class.

"It's awfully good of you," he said. "You know a lot more about the bovine nature than I do, for all I put in every spare minute studying the subject. I'm taking four different stock journals now, Miss Louise. I'll bet I know a lot more about the different strains of various breeds than you do, Miss Cattle-queen. But I'm beginning to see that we only know what we learn by experience. I've a new book on the subject of heredity of the cattle. I'm going home and see if Seabeck hasn't stumbled upon a strain that can be traced back to your native mountain sheep."

Billy Louise laughed and said good-by, and stood leaning over the gate watching him as he zigzagged up the hill, stopping his horse often to breathe. The wagon road took a round-about course, longer and less steep. At the top, just before he rounded a huge pimple on the face of the bluff, he stopped and looked down, saw her standing there, and waved his hat. His horse stood sidewise upon the trail for easier footing, and the man's head and shoulders were silhouetted sharply against the deep, clear blue of the sky. Billy Louise felt a little, unnamed thrill as she stared up at him. Her lips curved into tenderness. Clean, frank, easy-natured he was, as she had come to know him. It was like coming into a sunny spot to be with him. And then she sighed, with that vague feeling of dissatisfaction with herself. She felt crude and awkward and dull of wit. Her mother, Marthy, Ward—all the persons she knew—were crude and awkward and ignorant beside Charlie Fox. And she had had the temerity, the insufferable effrontery, to criticize him and patronize him over those four calves!

"He can strike out three men in succession," she murmured. "And he pitched whole games and never walked a man." She gave him a final wave of the hand, as he turned to climb on out of sight. "And I don't even know what he was talking about—though I think it was baseball. And I was awfully snippy about those calves he lost."

She began to wonder, then, about those calves. Vented and not rebranded, they would be easy game for any man who first got his own brand on them. She meant to get a description of them when she saw Charlie again—it was like his innocence to forget the most essential details!—and she meant to keep her eyes open. If Charlie were right about the calves not being anywhere in the Cove, then they had been driven out of it, stolen. Billy Louise turned dejectedly away from the fence and went down to a shady nook by the creek, where she had always liked to do her worrying and hard thinking.

She stooped and tried to catch a baby trout in her cupped palms, just as she used to try when she was a child. If those four calves were stolen, then there was a "rustler" in the country. And if there were, then no one's stock was safe. The deduction was terribly simple and as exact as the smallest sum in addition. And Billy Louise could not afford to pay toll to a rustler out of her forty-seven head of cattle.

The next day she rode early to the Cove and learned some things from Marthy which she had not gleaned from Charlie. She learned that two of the calves were a deep red, except for a wide, white strip on the nose of one and white hind feet on the other; that another was spotted on the hindquarters, and that the fourth was white, with large, red blotches. She had known cattle all her life. She would know these, if she saw them anywhere.

She also discovered for herself that they could not have broken out of that pasture, and that the river bank was impassable, because of high, thick bushes and miry mud in the open spaces. She had a fight with Blue over these latter places and demonstrated beyond doubt that they were miry, by getting him in to the knees in spite of his violent objections. They left deep tracks behind them when they got out. The calves had not gone investigating the bank, for there was not a trace anywhere. And the bluff was absolutely unscalable. Billy Louise herself would have felt doubtful of climbing out that way. The gray rim-rock stood straight and high at the top, with never a crevice, so far as she could see. And the gorge was barred, so that it was impossible to go that way without lifting heavy poles out of deep sockets and sliding them to one side.