CHAPTER XX
Now that the herd law was a fact, the next task Rob and Harry had to undertake was getting hay for the winter. Yet it was almost impossible for them to find time to look for it. Every day was crowded with work. The herd law would not take effect until the following spring, and the cattle at present in the hills would remain there until the fall round-up. Until then one or the other of the young people must always ride the fence to look for breaks, to push the range cattle back and to keep their own animals near home in an effort to stop the losses that continued with baffling persistence.
With the patience of an old hand Harry performed that part of the work. Early and late she rode to all the water holes not already gone dry, to all the favorite midday haunts of the herds, constantly hoping to find one or all of the six creatures that had disappeared. She found none of them; and, while she searched, two more steers, a yearling, and a cow and a calf vanished one by one.
Ludlum's "cow-punchers," with growing insolence, came repeatedly inside the fence to look through the milk cows and calves on pasture; and they never lost a chance to make threatening remarks to Harry about rustlers and what they were doing. Harry never repeated their remarks to Rob, for she was anxious to shield him from any additional annoyance.
Slowly she had waked up to the fact that behind her brother's undemonstrative calm there was deep anxiety and worry. Never given to talking much, he now scarcely spoke a word. His appetite vanished; when Harry begged him to eat, he said that he had a headache or that he had not slept very well the night before, which soon began to mean that he was not sleeping well any of the time.
"Poor Bobby is killing himself over the business, and there isn't a thing I can do to help him," she said to herself. "I can't even sell out until this fall, and by that time——"
But she could not say what she thought might happen by that time. The last cutting of hay would soon be made now, and Rob must surely be able to get some then.
By the middle of August the range was stripped of feed. The foothills, browsed over by thousands of sheep and cattle, burned by the dry winds and endless days of bright sunshine, stretched their dreary length of black lava and yellow sandstone buttes, gray sagebrush and trodden dust. Water holes and springs finally succumbed to the long drought, and from all sides the herds came down round the ranches. Trailing along the fences, they disturbed the silent nights with their uneasy bellowings.