Buck straightened abruptly. “What!” he exclaimed. “You mean to say there’s been rustling on the Shoe-Bar?”
Again Jessup hesitated, but more briefly. “I don’t know why I shouldn’t tell yuh. Everybody’s wise 52 to it, or suspects somethin’. They’ve got away with quite a bunch—mostly from the pastures around Las Vegas, over near the hills. Tex says they’re greasers, but I think—” He broke off to add a moment later in a troubled tone, “I wish to thunder he hadn’t gone an’ left Rick out there all alone.”
Stratton remembered Las Vegas as the name of a camp down at the southwesterly extremity of the ranch. It consisted of a one-room adobe shack, which was occupied at certain seasons of the year by one or two punchers, who from there could more easily look after the near-by cattle, or ride fence, than by going back and forth every day from the ranch headquarters.
“Who’s Rick?” he asked briefly.
“Rick Bemis. He—he’s one dandy fellow. We’ve worked together over two years.”
“H’m. How long’s this rustling been going on?”
“Three or four months.”
“Lost many head, have they?”
“Quite a bunch, I’d say, but I don’t know. They never tell me or Rick anythin’.”
Bud’s tone was bitter, and Stratton noticed it in spite of his preoccupation. Rustling! That would account for several of the things that had puzzled him. Rustling was possible, too, with the border-line comparatively near, and that stretch of rough, hilly country which touched the lower extremity of the ranch. But 53 for the stealing to go on for three or four months, without something drastic being done to stop it, seemed peculiar, to say the least.