“Yes, thanks. I’ve heard so much about the Bar T I should like to see a little more of it.”
When Larkin had left the room, Bissell, with a frown on his face, turned to Stelton. 17
“Tell all the boys what’s happened to-day,” he said, “and tell ’em to be on the watch for this young feller’s first herd. He’ll plenty soon find out he can’t run riot on my range.”
CHAPTER II
A LATE ARRIVAL
After visiting the corral, Larkin paid his respects to the pump and refreshed himself for supper. Then he strolled around the long, rambling ranch house. Across the front, which faced southwest, had been built a low apology for a veranda on which a couple of uninviting chairs stood. He appropriated one of these and settled back to think.
The late sun, a red-bronze color, hung just above the horizon and softened the unlovely stretches of prairie into something brooding and beautiful. Thirty miles away the Rockies had become a mass of gray-blue fleeced across the top with lines of late snow—for it was early June.
The Bar T ranch house itself stood on a rise of ground back from a cold, greenish-blue river that made a bend at this point, and that rose and had its being in the melting whiteness of those distant peaks. Between the willows of the river bottoms, Larkin could see the red reflection of the sun on the water, and could follow the stream’s 19 course across the prairie by the snake-like procession of cottonwoods that lined its banks.