Webb had come out of the war without a cent, but with a very definite purpose.  During the last year of the Confederacy, while it was tottering to its fall, he had served in Texas.  The cattle on the range had for years been running wild, the owners and herdsmen being absent with the Southern army.  They had multiplied prodigiously, so that many thousands of mavericks roamed without brand, the property of any one who would round them up and put an iron on their flanks.  The money value of them was very little.  A standard price for a yearling was a plug of tobacco.  But Webb looked to the future.  He hired two riders, gathered together a small remuda of culls, and went into the cattle business with energy.  To-day the Flying V Y was stamped on forty thousand longhorns.

The foreman of the Flying V Y was riding with the owner of the brand at the drag end of the herd.  He was a hard-faced citizen known as Joe Yankie.  When Wrayburn had finished his story, the foreman showed a row of tobacco-stained teeth in an unpleasant grin.

“Same old stuff, Dad.  There always is a bunch of bucks off the reservation an’ they’re always just goin’ to run our cattle away.  If you ask me there’s nothin’ to it.”

Young Thursday flushed.  “If you’ll ride out with me I’ll show you their trail.”

Yankie looked at him with a sneer.  He guessed this boy to be about eighteen.  There was a suggestion of effeminacy about the lad’s small, well-shaped hands and feet.  He was a slender, smooth-faced youth with mild blue eyes.  It occurred to Webb, too, that the stranger might have imagined the Apaches.  But in his motions was something of the lithe grace of the puma.  It was part of the business of the cattleman to judge men and he was not convinced that this young fellow was as inoffensive as he looked.

“Where you from?” asked the drover.

“From the San Carlos Agency.”

“Ever meet a man named Micky Free out there?”

“I’ve slept under the same tarp with him many’s the time when we were followin’ Chiricahua ’Paches.  He’s the biggest dare-devil that ever forked a horse.”

“Describe him.”

“Micky’s face is a map of Ireland.  He’s got only one eye; a buck punched the other out when he was a kid.  His hair is red an’ he wears it long.”

“Any beard?”

“A bristly little red mustache.”

“That’s Micky to a T.”  Webb made up his mind swiftly.  “The boy’s all right, Yankie.  He’ll do to take along.”

“It’s your outfit.  Suits me if he does you.”  The foreman turned insolently to the newcomer.  “What’d you say your name was, sissie?”

The eyes of the boy, behind narrowed lids, grew hard as steel.

“Call me Jimmie-Go-Get-’Em,” he drawled in a soft voice, every syllable distinct.

There was a moment of chill silence.  A swift surprise had flared into the eyes of the foreman.  The last thing in the world he had expected was to have his bad temper resented so promptly by this smooth-faced little chap.  Since Yankie was the camp bully he bristled up to protect his reputation.