“Come in,” he grunted.
The slim, dark stranger faced him. His words were as spare as his frame.
“Full handed?” he asked.
Now Charlie Shaw had a full crew of able riders—the only kind suffered on the Wineglass pay roll. Ordinarily, he would have said: “Yeah. Full up, unless somebody breaks his neck.” That would have ended it. But something about this youngster caught Charlie’s fancy. Neat, but not gaudy. Slender and keen—like a new sword. So he asked a question.
“Where you from?”
“Bad Lands.”
“That’s a lot of territory,” Charlie remarked. “All kinds of people use it.”
The boy smiled slightly.
“Oh, I’m no outlaw. My folks has a one-horse outfit down on a fork of Sand Coulee. Nothin’ much for me at home, so I ride round-up. I been up in the Sun River Basin breakin’ horses all winter.”
“Sand Coulee, eh.” Charlie glanced at the letter in his hand. It was a friendly suggestion from the Block S that the Wineglass come down and work with them and the Picador, as northwesterly blizzards had drifted several thousand Wineglass cattle to the heart of that range. And there was mention of this place in the letter. “That the Sand Coulee down on the Sutherland range?”