A few days would find the cowhands back from the round-up. The homesteaders must make one more trip to the railroad to freight in the stacker and the two buck-sweeps to be used in putting up the hay. This trip was delayed only till the round-up crew was back from the range for a week of leisure and could act as guards while the others were away.
As the tangible results of the work became more apparent Harris's vigilance increased. There was now more than plowed ground to work on; crops to be trampled at a time when they would not lift again to permit of mowing; fences to be wrecked so that range stock might have free access to the fields. A single night could upset the work of many months. But as he stood with Billie at the mouth of the lane he allowed none of his thoughts to be reflected in his speech.
It was two hours before dark and the perspective toward the east was already foreshortened. Two jackrabbits hopped into the lane and moved down toward the meadow. The homesteaders had turned their hands to another job. Tiny and Russ, shod with rubber boots, were leaning on their long-handled shovels in the forty nearest the house. Beyond them the other irrigators were spreading the water over the growing crops.
Billie Warren half-closed her eyes and viewed the broad expanse of rippling green in the bottoms. How many times she had stood here in the past with old Cal Warren while he visioned this very picture which now unrolled before her eyes in reality; the transformation of the Three Bar flat from a desert waste to a scene of abundant fertility under the reclaiming touch of water.
It was a quiet picture of farm life if one looked only upon the blooming fields and took no account of the raw, barren foothills that flanked them,—the gaunt, towering range behind. She found it difficult to link the scene before her with the deviltry of a few months past. The killing of Bangs and Rile Foster's consequent grim retaliation; the raid on Three Bar bulls and the stampede of her trail herd; all those seemed part of some life so long in the past as to form no part of her present.
The continued immunity had had its effect, regardless of her earlier suspicions. She still realized the possibility of further raids but they had been so long delayed that the prospect had ceased to impress her as imminent. Tiny and Russ changed their head of water. As they shifted positions she noted that each carried some tool beside his irrigator's shovel. No man in the field ever strayed far from the rifle which was part of his equipment. But even this was an evidence of vigilance which had met her eye every day for months and had ceased to impress.
They walked to the near edge of the field and Harris stooped to part the knee-deep grain, pointing to the slender stems of alfalfa with their delicate leaves.
"We have a record stand of young hay," he said. "It's thick all through—every place I've looked." He straightened up and laughed. "And I expect I've looked at every acre. I've been right interested in those little shoots. It's deep-rooted now. The worst is past. I don't see that anything that could happen now would kill it out. Next year we'll put up a thousand tons of hay."
He dropped a hand on her shoulder and stood looking down at her.
"Billie, don't you think it's about time you were finding out what Judge Colton wants?" he asked. "He's been right insistent on your going back to confer with him."