“Hardy,” he said, “I like your style. You’ve got a head, and you know how to keep your mouth shut. More’n that, you don’t drink. A man like you could git to be a boss sheep-herder in six months; you could make a small fortune in three years and never know you was workin’. You don’t need to work, boy; I kin git a hundred men to work––what I want 157 is a man that can think. Now, say, I’m goin’ to need a man pretty soon––come around and see me some time.”
“All right,” said Hardy, reluctantly, “but I might as well tell you now that I’m satisfied where I am.”
“Satisfied!” ripped out Swope, with an oath. “Satisfied! Why, man alive, you’re jest hanging on by your eyebrows up there at Hidden Water! You haven’t got nothin’; you don’t even own the house you live in. I could go up there to-morrow and file on that land and you couldn’t do a dam’ thing. Judge Ware thought he was pretty smooth when he euchred me out of that place, but I want to tell you, boy––and you can tell him, if you want to––that Old Man Winship never held no title to that place, and it’s public land to-day. That’s all public land up there; there ain’t a foot of land in the Four Peaks country that I can’t run my sheep over if I want to, and keep within my legal rights. So that’s where you’re at, Mr. Hardy, if you want to know!”
He stopped and rammed a cut of tobacco into his pipe, while Hardy tapped his boot meditatively. “Well,” he said at last, “if that’s the way things are, I’m much obliged to you for not sheeping us out this Spring. Of course, I haven’t been in the country long, and I don’t know much about these matters, but I tried to accommodate you all I could, thinking––”
“That ain’t the point,” broke in Swope, smoking fiercely, “I ain’t threatening ye, and I appreciate your hospitality––but here’s the point. What’s the use of your monkeying along up there on a job that is sure to play out, when you can go into a better business? Answer me that, now!”
But Hardy only meditated in silence. It was beyond contemplation that he should hire himself out as a sheep-herder, but if he said so frankly it might call down the wrath of Jim Swope upon both him and the Dos S. So he stood pat and began to fish for information.
“Maybe you just think my job is going to play out,” he suggested, diplomatically. “If I’d go to a cowman, now, or ask Judge Ware, they might tell me I had it cinched for life.”
Swope puffed smoke for a minute in a fulminating, dangerous silence.
“Huh!” he said. “I can dead easy answer for that. Your job, Mr. Hardy, lasts jest as long as I want it to––and no longer. Now, you can figure that out for yourself. But I’d jest like to ask you a question, since you’re so smart; how come all us sheepmen kept off your upper range this year?”