An answer was not immediately forthcoming from the rancher; he sat staring absently at the backs of his roughened hands, now and again rubbing one or the other, and enveloped in a gloom that Bryant could both see and feel. Then all at once Stevenson began to talk, in a voice querulous and morose.
"We're going to quit here, sell the sheep, and go back East. I was swindled when I bought this ranch, and I want to get away before I lose my last cent. Came out to this country five years ago from Illinois with forty thousand dollars, and now we're going back with what I can sell my sheep for, maybe twenty-five hundred cash. Menocal robbed me right at the start, selling me this place for twenty-five thousand—twenty thousand down and a mortgage for the remaining five thousand—when the place was just five thousand acres of sagebrush, with no more water than runs in this creek. I was a tenderfoot all right! The land agent at Kennard showed it to me in June when the Perro was booming, and I believed him when he said it ran that way all the year around. Look at it now! I didn't have sense enough to inquire and learn about it, being in a hurry to get into the sheep business and thinking I should be rich in no time. That agent sold it to me for irrigated land, and a bargain at five dollars an acre. Menocal, who owned it and deeded it to me, pretends he isn't responsible for what the man said. Five dollars an acre! It's worth about fifty cents for winter range, and no more."
"If it could be irrigated, it would be a bargain sure enough at five dollars," Lee stated. "And there's another water right for the place you said when I was here before."
"Yes, there is—on paper. Water was appropriated out of the Pinas River, but that's eight miles north of here, and it would cost a hundred thousand dollars, if not more, to build a dam and a canal along the mountain side. No, sir; that appropriation was just some more of Menocal's tricky work! He jammed it through the land office thirty years ago and, they say, never did any more to comply with the law requiring delivery of the water on this ground than to have a man drive around pouring a bucketful out of a barrel upon each quarter section."
"Some pretty shady transactions were put across in those early days," Bryant commented.
"Well, ain't matters just as bad now?" Stevenson asked, quickly. "He still has the appropriation, or rather I'm supposed to have it with this ranch. Because Menocal controls the Mexican vote hereabouts, which is about all the vote there is, why, nobody has ever disturbed him about that water right. And he's using that water, belonging to me, to irrigate a lot of bottom farms along the river, for which no water can be appropriated, the Pinas not carrying enough. I rode over one day and looked at those farms—all grain and alfalfa. Well, he'll get this ranch back, anyway. The mortgage he holds on it is due next week and I can't pay it. Wouldn't even if I had the money. We're going to pull up stakes and leave."
Bryant silently regarded the other's haggard face and stooped figure, whose expression and resigned attitude revealed clearly Stevenson's surrender. He was a man discouraged, disheartened, whipped.
"What's wrong with the sheep?" he questioned, at length.
"Not much that isn't wrong. When I started five years ago, I invested in three thousand head. One time I had them increased to fifty-five hundred—three bands. Thought I was doing first rate; and I was then. But everything began to go against me. It seemed as if I always got the worst herders; and not having any water to raise alfalfa I had to buy winter feed, which was expensive; and a lot of them got the scab and died; and last year I lost nearly all my lambs at lambing time, the band being caught out in a storm and being in the wrong place. Just one thing after another, to break my back. Had trouble about the range, too. When I started them off this spring, they were down to seven hundred; and I've been losing some right along from one cause or another. No lambs, either, this spring, except dead ones. I thought I could hang on till my luck changed, but losing a hundred head two weeks ago was the last straw. I'm done now."
"What happened, Stevenson?"