"Not for nobody else," corrected Johnny, "me least of all. That title is questioned now by more than a dozen men. You can't keep 'em, nohow, for th' general round-up will cut 'em four ways. Th' times are changin' down here like they changed some years back on th' older ranges. Th' runnin' iron is dyin' fast, an' for good reasons. Maverickin' is goin' out of style—an' nothin' can stop it. An' with it goes that title you was mentionin'. Why not get ahead of 'em, an' throw them cows over onto th' SV before anybody gets insultin' you?"
"I'll have somethin' to say about any styles changin' down here," retorted the foreman. "Mebby more than some folks think."
"You ain't got a chance, not a chance," Johnny assured him. "You'll be like th' Injun that tried to push back th' first, an' last, engine he ever saw. It was goin' strong when he tried it."
"An' I ain't got th' authority to give away a cow, not even a single dogie—not to mention a herd. I'm not ownin' this ranch; I'm workin' for it. How can I straighten out my tally sheets to cover th' loss of a herd like that? They don't belong to me—they belong to th' ranch, to th' owners." He was wasting as much time in argument as he knew how in the hope that his outfit would return.
"Pshaw!" laughed Johnny. "They can all be accounted for. Didn't I just say that they never got on th' tally sheets at all? You shore found you had been feedin' a hull passel of cows that didn't belong to th' ranch in case they did get on th' tally sheets. You found it out, an' it was so plumb careless of yore line riders that you up an' fired them that was responsible. That won't bother you, because you got three names off yore pay-roll right now. There ain't nothin' we can't get around if we pull together."
"But th' title to 'em wouldn't stick," objected the baited foreman. "Every one of them cows could be took away from Arnold. I ain't got th' authority to make it stick. An' th' only reason I'm wastin' time talkin' to you over a fool thing like this is because you got a gun on me, an' I can't help myself." His brain seized upon and rejected scheme after scheme for getting out of the situation, one of which he recalled and examined anew. It was not a bad one, if bad came to worse, and he nursed it, sorry that so much time would have to elapse before he could carry it out.
"I just said we could get around anythin'," replied Johnny, pleasantly. "There's an awful lot of mavericks runnin' around on this ranch, most of 'em under four years old. They wouldn't show any Bar H brand. They'd only have a SV. There wouldn't even be a vent brand to single 'em out; an' cattle ain't tellin' where they come from, or we'd 'a' heard a lot of scandals long ago."
"Nine hundred an' seventy mavericks!" snorted Big Tom. "A fine chance I'd have of roundin' up that many! Yo're plumb loco."
"That is a lot, I'll admit," conceded Johnny, apparently balked. "Of course, if you owned this ranch, you could make it up with Bar H brands. But you don't. You can't give away nothin' that you don't own. I can see where that would put you. Anythin' that was yours you could give away; but not no Bar H belongin's. That yore idea?"