“Oh, shut up about them beans!” implored Andy Green with a bored air.  “It’s water they want; and a touch of the hoe now and then.  You leave ’em for a month at a time and then go back and wonder why you can’t pick a hatful off ’em.  Same as the rest of us have been ranching,” he added ruefully, turning to Luck.  “With the best intentions in the world, the Lord never meant us fellers for farmers, and that’s a fact.  We’ll drop a hoe any time of day or night to get out riding after stock.  Of course, we didn’t take up our claims with the idea of settling down and riding a hoe handle the rest of our lives.  If we had, I guess maybe we’d have done a little better at it.”

“We did what we started out to do,” the Native Son pointed out lazily:  “We saved the range—­what little there is to save—­and we kept a lot of poor yaps from starving to death on that land, didn’t we?” He smiled slowly.  “If I hadn’t gotten gay and planted those beans,” he added, “I’d be feeling fine over it.  A girl gave me a handful of pinto beans and asked me to plant them—­I did hoe them,” he defended tardily to Andy.  “I hoed them the day before the Fourth.  You know I did.  Same time you hoed those lemon-colored spuds of yours.”

Luck let them wrangle humorously over their agricultural deficiencies, and drifted off into open-eyed dreaming.  Into his picture he began to fit these two speculatively, with a purely tentative adjustment of their personalities to his requirements.  They were arguing about which of the two was the worst farmer; but Luck, riding alongside them, was seeing them slouched in their saddles and riding, bone-tired, with a shuffling trail-herd hurrying to the next watering place.  He was seeing them galloping hard on the flanks of a storm-lashed stampede, with cunningly placed radium flares lighting the scene brilliantly now and then.  He was seeing these two plodding, heads bent, into the teeth of a blizzard.  He was seeing...

“I’ll have to ride home to the missus now,” Andy announced the second time before Luck heard him.

“Mig will take you on down to the home ranch, and after supper I’ll ride over.  So long.”

He swung away from them upon a faintly beaten trail, looked back once to grin and wave his hand, and touched his horse with the spurs.  Luck stared after him thoughtfully, but he did not put his thoughts into words.  He had been trained in the hard school of pictures.  He had learned to hold his tongue upon certain matters, such as his opinion of a man’s personal attributes, or criticism of his appearance, or anything which might be repeated, maliciously or otherwise, to that man.  He did not say to Miguel Rapponi, for instance, what he thought of Andy Green as a man or a rider.  He did not mention him at all.  He had learned in bitterness how idle gossip may eat away the efficiency of a whole company.

For that reason, and also because his mind was busy with his plans and the best means of carrying them out, the two rode almost in silence to the hill that shut the Flying U coulee away from the world.  Luck gave a long sigh and muttered “Great!” when the whole coulee lay spread before them.  Then his quick glances took in various details of the ranch and he sighed again, from a different emotion.