Lee Virginia wondered about all this supervision, for it was new to her.
Gregg, the sheepman, went on: “As I tell Redfield, I don’t object to the forest policy—it’s a good thing for me; I get my sheep pastured cheaper than I could do any other way, but it makes me hot to have grazing lines run on me and my herders jacked up every time they get over the line. Ross run one bunch off the reservation last Friday. I’m going to find out about that. He’ll learn he can’t get ‘arbitrary’ with me.”
Lee Virginia, glancing back at this man, felt sorry for any one who opposed him, for she recalled him as one of the fiercest of the cattle-men—one ever ready to cut a farmer’s fence or burn a sheep-herder’s wagon.
The old woman chuckled: “’Pears like you’ve changed your tune since ’98, Sam.”
He admitted his conversion shamelessly. “I’m for whatever will pay best. Just now, with a high tariff, sheep are the boys. So long as I can get on the reserve at seven cents a head—lambs free—I’m going to put every dollar I’ve got into sheep.”
“You’re going to get thrown off altogether one of these days,” said the young man on the back seat.
Thereupon a violent discussion arose over the question of the right of a sheepman to claim first grass for his flocks, and Gregg boasted that he cared nothing for “the dead-line.” “I’ll throw my sheep where I please,” he declared. “They’ve tried to run me out of Deer Creek, but I’m there to stay. I have ten thousand more on the way, and the man that tries to stop me will find trouble.”
The car was descending into the valley of the Roaring Fork now, and wire fences and alfalfa fields on either side gave further evidence of the change in the land’s dominion. New houses of frame and old houses in fresh paint shone vividly from the green of the willows and cottonwoods. A ball-ground on the outskirts of the village was another guarantee of progress. The cowboy was no longer the undisputed prince of the country fair.
Down past the court-house, refurbished and deeper sunk in trees, Lee Virginia rode, recalling the wild night when three hundred armed and vengeful cowboys surrounded it, holding three cattle-barons and their hired invaders against all comers, resolute to be their own judge, jury, and hangman. It was all as peaceful as a Sunday afternoon at this moment, with no sign of the fierce passions of the past.
There were new store-buildings and cement walks along the main street of the town, and here and there a real lawn, cut by a lawn-mower; but as the machine buzzed on toward the river the familiar little old battlemented buildings came to view. The Palace Hotel, half log, half battlement, remained on its perilous site beside the river. The triangle where the trails met still held Halsey’s Three Forks Saloon, and next to it stood Markheit’s general store, from which the cowboys and citizens had armed themselves during the ten days’ war of cattle-men and rustlers.