"When is the thing coming off?"
"We haven't decided yet. We four will talk that over. Perhaps the same night they get in. They'll be restless then and easy to start."
"But won't the foreman corral the sheep?"
"Don't think so. Haven't room. They haven't fixed up a new corral, because they expected to graze the sheep on north. That many will clean up the range right straight ahead of us for more'n a hundred miles, so that we cattle men won't have half a chance to graze our cattle," grinned the spokesman of the party.
His companions laughed harshly.
"I reckon," answered another. "We'll have all the cattle men on both sides of the Rosebud range so stirred up that they will pitch into that flock like hyenas who haven't had a square meal since snow fell last. When they break loose there's going to be fun, now I tell you. That's the time we get busy. We ought to be able to get a thousand of them anyhow. Before next morning we'll be so far down toward the Big Horn range that they won't catch us. And besides, after the cattle men get through killing mutton, a thousand more or less won't be missed. It'll make a nice bunch to add to our flock. If we work that a few times we'll have enough to make a shipment worth while."
"So that's the game is it?" muttered Tad Butler. "Well, they won't do it if I can help it." Yet be realized how powerless he was at that moment to defeat their nefarious plans.
Somehow they were going to urge the real cattle men to use highhanded measures to destroy Mr. Simms's flock. They were going to scatter them, and then these men were going to make off with all they could drive away. It did not seem to the listening boy that such things were possible; yet Mr. Simms was authority for the statement that such acts were not unknown in this far northern state.
There were still many points that Tad was not clear on, but he had heard enough to enable him to give the rancher a timely warning of what they proposed to do.
The lad knew what that meant. It meant trouble. His sympathies had been largely with the cattle men—he had looked down on the sheep industry and for the reason that he knew only what the cattle men had told him about it.