When Wade entered the office, Moran was seated at his desk, chewing on a cigar, above which his closely cropped reddish mustache bristled. Like Senator Rexhill, he was a man of girth and bulk, but his ape-like body was endowed with a strength which not even his gross life had been able to wreck, and he was always muscularly fit. Except for the miner's hip boots, which he wore, he was rather handsomely dressed, and would have been called tastefully so in the betting ring of a metropolitan race-track, where his diamond scarf-pin and ring would have been admired.
"Hello!" he boomed as Wade entered. "Have a cigar." He pushed a box of an excellent brand toward his visitor and waved him to a chair. His greeting was noisy rather than cordial.
Wade declined both the chair and the cigar.
"I dropped in to find out why you told Jensen to run his sheep in on my range," he began bluntly.
"Let me see—" The agent very deliberately lifted a large, white hand and took the cigar out of his mouth. "Just what range is that?"
"The upper valley range which I have under lease."
"Which you have under lease?" Moran affected sarcastic surprise. "I wasn't aware that you had any legal right to that part of the valley. It's government land, ain't it?"
"You seem to have forgotten that you once tried to buy the lease from me." The rancher bared his teeth in a grim smile. "We'll not quibble over that, however. We've got our legal rights, all of us; but we're a long distance from the courts here. What I want to know in plain English is, will you order Jensen to trail those sheep? Now, wait a moment!"
Moran subsided with a show of tolerance he did not feel.
"Think well before you answer," Wade went on. "I'm not here to threaten you, but there are desperate men in this valley who will take matters into their own hands, if this business is not stopped. There's plenty of grass on the other side of the mountains and your sheep are welcome to it. Why don't you make use of it?"