“That’s just why I didn’t let you know. I didn’t want a job on the ranch. I wanted to do something for myself. I concluded I had been dependent on other people about long enough. I’m not mushy, or converted, or anything like that, Bud, but I figured that when the governor died and left me without a cent I had deserved everything I got and was a disgrace to the family and myself.”
“Same with me, Lester,” acknowledged Bud. “If you had only told me how you felt about things we could have struck out here together.”
“And you with all the money? I guess not,” and Lester spoke bitterly. 248
“I’d have divided with you in a minute, if you had talked to me the way you’re doing now. We always used to divide things when we were kids, you know.”
“That’s square of you, Bud, but I really don’t want the money now. I’m making a good go of my pictures; I don’t owe anybody, and I haven’t an enemy that I know of. What have you done with your money?”
Larkin turned around and motioned toward the thousands of sheep dotted over the hills.
“There’s all my available cash. Of course there was some in securities I couldn’t realize on by the terms of father’s will, and if I go to the wall I can always get enough to live on out of that. But my idea is to get a living out of this, and just now I am in the very devil of a fix.”
“How?”
Bud narrated briefly the stormy events that had led up to this final stroke by which he hoped to defeat the cowmen and save his own fortune; and as he did so he observed his brother closely.
Lester Larkin was three years younger than Bud, was smaller, and had grown up with a weak and vacillating character. The youngest child in the wealthy Larkin family, he had been spoiled 249 and indulged until when a youth in his teens he had become the despair of them all.