The judge had been on to Washington and was possessed of all the material facts, but nobody was interested any more in the Salagua Forest Reserve; he had consulted with the Chief Forester and even with the President himself, laying before them the imminence of the danger, and they had assured him that everything possible would be done to relieve the situation. Did it not, then, he demanded, behoove the law-abiding residents of prospective forest reserves to coöperate with such an enlightened administration, even at the risk of some temporary personal loss? And with one voice the Four Peaks cowmen agreed that it did. There was something eerie about it––the old judge was dazed by their acquiescence.
Of all the cowmen at Hidden Water, Rufus Hardy was the only man who would discuss the matter at length. A change had come over him now; he was very thin and quiet, with set lines along his jaw, but instead of riding nervously up and down the river as he had the year before he lingered idly about the ranch, keeping tally at the branding and entertaining his guests. No matter how pedantic or polemical the 440 old judge became, Hardy was willing to listen to him; and Lucy, hovering in the background, would often smile to hear them argue, the judge laying down the law and equity of the matter and Rufus meeting him like an expert swordsman with parry and thrust. Day by day, his prejudice wearing away from lack of any real opposition, Judge Ware became more and more pleased with his daughter’s superintendent; but Lucy herself was troubled. There was a look in his eyes that she had never seen before, a set and haggard stare that came when he sat alone, and his head was always turned aside, as if he were listening. The sheep came trooping in from the south, marching in long lines to the river’s edge, and still he sat quiet, just inside the door, listening.
“Tell me, Rufus,” she said, one day when her father was inspecting the upper range with Creede, “what is it that made you so sad? Is it––Kitty?”
For a minute he gazed at her, a faint smile on his lips.
“No,” he said, at last, “it is not Kitty.” And then he lapsed back into silence, his head turned as before.
The wind breathed through the corredor, bringing with it a distant, plaintive bleating––the sheep, waiting beyond the turbid river to cross.
“I have forgotten about Kitty,” he said absently. “For me there is nothing in the world but sheep. 441 Can’t you hear them bleating down there?” he cried, throwing out his hands. “Can’t you smell them? Ah, Lucy, if you knew sheep as I do! I never hear a sheep now that I don’t think of that day last year when they came pouring out of Hell’s Hip Pocket with a noise like the end of the world. If I had been there to stop them they might never have taken the range––but after that, all through the hot summer when the cattle were dying for feed, every time the wind came up and roared in my ears I would hear sheep––baaa, baaa––and now I hear them again.”
He paused and looked up at her intently.
“Do you know what that noise means to me?” he demanded, almost roughly. “It means little calves dying around the water hole; mothers lowing for their little ones that they have left to starve; it means long lines of cows following me out over the mesa for brush, and all the trees cut down. Ah, Lucy, how can your father talk of waiting when it means as much as that?”
“But last year was a drought,” protested Lucy pitifully. “Will it be as bad this year?”