“Father’s orders,” he said.  “He wants us to ride Seeping Springs last because he’ll be with us then, and Snap too.  We’re going to have trouble over there.”

“How’s this branding stock going to help the matter any, I’d like to know?” inquired George.  “We Mormons never needed it.”

“Father says we’ll all have to come to it.  Holderness’s stock is branded.  Perhaps he’s marked a good many steers of ours.  We can’t tell.  But if we have our own branded we’ll know what’s ours.  If he drives our stock we’ll know it; if Dene steals, it can be proved that he steals.”

“Well, what then?  Do you think he’ll care for that, or Holderness either?”

“No, only it makes this difference:  both things will then be barefaced robbery.  We’ve never been able to prove anything, though we boys know; we don’t need any proof.  Father gives these men the benefit of a doubt.  We’ve got to stand by him.  I know, George, your hand’s begun to itch for your gun.  So does mine.  But we’ve orders to obey.”

Many gullies and canyons headed up on the slope of Coconina west of Silver Cup, and ran down to open wide on the flat desert.  They contained plots of white sage and bunches of rich grass and cold springs.  The steers that ranged these ravines were wild as wolves, and in the tangled thickets of juniper and manzanita and jumbles of weathered cliff they were exceedingly difficult to catch.

Well it was that Hare had received his initiation and had become inured to rough, incessant work, for now he came to know the real stuff of which these Mormons were made.  No obstacle barred them.  They penetrated the gullies to the last step; they rode weathered slopes that were difficult for deer to stick upon; they thrashed the bayonet-guarded manzanita copses; they climbed into labyrinthine fastnesses, penetrating to every nook where a steer could hide.  Miles of sliding slope and marble-bottomed streambeds were ascended on foot, for cattle could climb where a horse could not.  Climbing was arduous enough, yet the hardest and most perilous toil began when a wild steer was cornered.  They roped the animals on moving slopes of weathered stone, and branded them on the edges of precipices.

The days and weeks passed, how many no one counted or cared.  The circle of the sun daily lowered over the south end of Coconina; and the black snow-clouds crept down the slopes.  Frost whitened the ground at dawn, and held half the day in the shade.  Winter was close at the heels of the long autumn.

As for Hare, true to August Naab’s assertion, he had lost flesh and suffered, and though the process was heartbreaking in its severity, he hung on till he hardened into a leather lunged, wire-muscled man, capable of keeping pace with his companions.