‘I riz from bein’ a common puncher.’
It did not take Peter Morgan long to discover that Paul Lane and his family did not intend to move away. And there was a law against killing nesters, even on the Black Horse range; so Peter instructed his punchers to confine their operations to annoyance, instead of open warfare.
‘You’ll never annoy that feller enough to make him move,’ declared Spike. ‘Mebby we can make him so fightin’ mad that he’ll kill some of us, and then yuh can have him hung.’
‘You watch him,’ said Peter. ‘Him and that fool son of his will likely maverick a few calves, and then we’ll have him where the hair’s short. There’s a maverick law, yuh know, Spike.’
‘What kind of a law?’
‘Every orejano belongs to the Cattlemen’s Association.’
‘Shucks! And I aimed to go into that cow business myself some day.’
It might be explained that an orejano is an unbranded, weaned calf, which had always been legitimate prey for the first man who found it and put on his brand. In some parts of the country, especially farther north, they were known as ‘mavericks,’ but in the Southwest, where many of the Spanish words were used, they were generally spoken of as an orejano.
The unbranded, motherless calf has often been the nucleus of a big herd, and the practice had become so common that industrious cowboys, anxious to build a herd as quickly as possible, ‘made’ mavericks or orejanos by the simple process of separating a calf from its mother by force. This practice became so prevalent that it became necessary to pass laws governing the disposal of all motherless, unbranded calves. This was a law that had been recently passed, and few of the cowboys were aware that such a thing had been done.
Dave Morgan seemed greatly amused at Peter’s failure to remove the Lane family, and his three punchers rubbed it in on the boys from the 6X6 on every occasion. Nan Lane came to Mesa City once in a while, and the cowboys looked upon her with great favor, although none of them had met her.