Had he been a suspected horse-thief, the unwritten social etiquette of the plains would have provided him with food and lodging as long as he cared to stay. Consequently when he had caught the reflection of the setting sun against the walls 13 of the ranch house, he had turned Pinte’s head in the direction of the corral.
Then, in the living-room, though no questions had been asked, Larkin had brought up the much-dreaded subject himself, as his visit was partly for that purpose.
He had much to contend with. In the first place, being a sheepman, he was absolutely without caste in the cattle country, where men who went in for the “woolly idiots,” as someone has aptly called them, was considered for the most part as a degenerate, and only fit for target practice. This side of the matter troubled him not at all, however.
What did worry him was the element of right in the cattlemen’s attitude! a right that was still a wrong. For he had to acknowledge that when sheep had once fed across a range, that range was ruined for cattle for the period of at least a year.
This was due to the fact that the sheep, cropping into the very roots of the gray grass itself, destroyed it. Moreover, the animals on their slow marches, herded so close together that they left an offensive trail rather than follow which the cattle would stand and starve.
On the other hand, the range was free and the 14 sheep had as much right to graze there as the cattle, a fact that the cattlemen, with all their strict code of justice, refused to recognize.
Larkin knew that he had come to the parting of the ways at the Bar T ranch.
Old Beef Bissell was what was known at that time as a cattle king. His thousands of steers, wealth on the hoof, grazed far and wide over the fenceless prairies. His range riders rarely saw the ranch house for a month at a time, so great was his assumed territory; his cowboys outnumbered those of any owner within three hundred miles. Aside from this, he was the head of a cattlemen’s association that had banded together against rustlers and other invaders of the range.
Larkin returned to the conversation.
“Try to see it from my standpoint,” he said to Bissell. “If you had gone in for sheep as I have—”