“What’s this I hear about another settler up on Bear Creek?” he asked curtly after he had gathered up his bridle and swung to the saddle.

“That’s the way Jim Budd’s telling it, Mr. Weaver.  Another nester homesteaded there,” old Joe Yeager answered casually, chewing tobacco with a noncommittal air.

“Fine!  There’ll soon be a right smart settlement up near the headwaters of the creeks, I shouldn’t wonder.  The cow business is getting to be a mighty profitable one when you don’t own any,” Buck said dryly.

The others laughed, but with small merriment.  They were either small cattle owners themselves or range riders whose living depended on the business, and during the past two years a band of rustlers had operated so boldly as to have wiped out the profits of some of the ranchers.  Most of them disliked Buck extremely for his overbearing ways.  But they did not usually tell him so.  On this particular subject, too, they joined hand with him.

“You’re dead right, Mr. Weaver.  It ce’tainly must be stopped.”

The man who spoke rolled a cigarette and lit it.  Like the rest he was in the common garb of the plains.  The broad-brimmed felt hat, the shiny leather chaps, the loosely knotted bandanna, were as much a matter of course as the hard-eyed, weather-beaten look that comes of life under an untempered sun.  But Brill Healy claimed a distinction above his fellows.  He was a black-haired, picturesque fellow, as supple as a panther, reckless and yet wary.

“We’ll have rustling as long as we have nesters, Brill,” Buck told him.

“If that’s the case we’ll serve notice on the nesters to get out,” Healy replied.

Buck grinned.  Indomitable fighter though he was, he had been unable to roll back the advancing tide of settlement.  Here and there homesteaders had taken up land and had brought in small bunches of cattle.  Most of these were honest men, others suspected rustlers.  But Buck’s fiat had not sufficed to keep them out.  They had held stoutly to their own and—­he suspected—­a good deal more than their own.  Calves had been branded secretly and cows killed or driven away.

“Go to it, Brill,” Weaver jeered.  “I’m wishing you all the luck in the world.”

He touched his pony with the spur and swept up the road in a cloud of white dust.

Not till he had disappeared did conversation renew itself languidly, for Seven Mile Ranch was lying under the lethargy of a summery sun.

“I expect Buck’s got the right of it,” volunteered a brawny youth known as Slim.  “All you got to do is to take up a claim near a couple of big outfits with easy brands, then keep your iron hot and industrious.  There’s sure money in being a nester.”