“Then why don’t you do the job yourselves, ’stead of callin’ a peaceable man away from his ranchin’?”
“You’re one kind of a gentleman, Mark, and I’m another, and there’s different jobs for different men. That ain’t my line.”
“Oh hell!” said Mark, laying upon the words an eloquent stress.
“All you’ve got to do is keep clear of the reservation; don’t turn a card here, no matter how easy it looks. We can’t jerk you out of the hands of the army if you git mixed up with it; that’s one place 8 where we stop. The reservation’s a middle ground where we meet the nesters—rustlers, every muddy-bellied wolf of ’em, and we can prove it—and pass ’em by. They come and go here like white men, and nothing said. Keep clear of the reservation; that’s all you’ve got to do to be as safe as if you was layin’ in bed on your ranch up in Jackson’s Hole.”
Chadron winked as he named that refuge of the hunted in the Northwest. Mark appeared to be considering something weightily.
“Oh, well, if they’re rustlers—nobody ain’t got no use for a rustler,” he said.
“There’s men in that bunch of twenty”—tapping the slip of paper with his finger—“that started with two cows a couple of years ago that’s got fifty and sixty head of two-year-olds now,” Chadron feelingly declared.
“How much’re you willin’ to go?” Mark put the question with a suddenness which seemed to betray that he had been saving it to shoot off that way, as a disagreeable point over which he expected a quarrel. He squinted his draggled left eye at Chadron, as if he was taking aim, while he waited for a reply.
“Well, you have done it for fifty a head,” Chadron said.
“Things is higher now, and I’m older, and the resk’s bigger,” Mark complained. “How fur apart do they lay?”