Wade smiled as he passed into the adjoining room to remove his spurs and chaps. "There's a Chinese coming up from town to-morrow," he said.
Santry peered across the stove to watch him as he moved about his room. The week before, a large picture of an extremely beautiful girl, which she had sent to Wade and which at first he had seemed to consider his most precious ornament, had fallen face downward on the table. Santry was curious to see how long it would be before Wade would set it up again, and he chuckled to himself when he saw that no move was made to do so. Wade had presented Santry to the girl some months before, when the two men were on a cattle-selling trip to Chicago, and the old plainsman had not cared for her, although he had recognized her beauty and knew that she was wealthy in her own right, and moreover was the only child of a famous United States Senator.
"There's thunder to pay over in the valley, Bill." Wade had produced "makings," and rolled himself a cigarette as he watched the foreman cooking. "Sheep—thousands of them—are coming in."
"What?" Santry straightened up with a jerk which nearly capsized the frying pan. "Sheep? On our range? You ain't kiddin' me?"
"Nope. Wish I was, but it's a fact. The sheep are feeding on the grass that we hoped to save against the winter. It's the Jensen outfit, I could make that out from where I stood."
"Hell!" Stamping angrily across the floor, Santry gazed out into the twilight. "That dirty, low-lived Swede? But we'll fix him, boy. I know his breed, the skunk! I'll...." The veins in the old plainsman's throat stood out and the pupils of his eyes contracted. "I'll run his blamed outfit out of the valley before noon termorrer. I'll make Jensen wish...."
"Steady, Bill!" Wade interposed, before the other could voice the threat. "Violence may come later on perhaps; but right now we must try to avoid a fight."
"But by the great horned toad...!"
Santry stretched out his powerful hands and slowly clenched his fingers. He was thinking of the pleasure it would give him to fasten them on Jensen.
"The thing puzzles me," Wade went on, flecking his cigarette through the window. "Jensen would never dare to come in here on his own initiative. He knows that we cowmen have controlled this valley for years, and he's no fighter. There's lots of good grass on the other side of the mountains, and he knows that as well as we do. Why does he take chances, then, on losing his stock, and maybe some of his herders by butting in here?"