As yet no single loss had been noted by the Poison Hole outfit.  But Thornton believed that he saw the reason:  now, there were few nights that found him at the range cabin or his cowboys in the bunk house.  His cattle had been brought down from the mountains, herded into the open meadow lands, and the night riders kept what watch they could upon the big herds.  Many a night he lay in his blankets close to the border of his range upon the south, knowing that here and there upon other borders, watching over his cattle, guarding the mouths of canons down which a rustler might choose his way, his men lay.  He began to wish that his property might be attacked, feeling secure in his alertness, thinking that an over bold “badman” might come suddenly to the end of his depredations here.  And yet no attack came, not so much as a wandering yearling was lost to him.

Men of the stamp and calibre of these ranchers who were hearing of a neighbour’s losses only as a sort of prelude to their own, were not patient men at the best, nor did such lives as they led permit of lax hands and natures without initiative.  It was in no way a surprise to Thornton, upon riding to the Bar X, to learn that the cattle men were now rising swiftly and actively to a defence of their own property.  Many of them lifted frank and angry voices in condemnation of their county sheriff, many of them more generously admitted that Dalton was up against a hard proposition and was doing all that any one man could do.  But they were unanimous in saying that what Cole Dalton couldn’t do they would do.

This morning Thornton found old man King saddling his horse in the Bar X corrals and snapping out orders to his foreman and the two cowboys who sat their horses watching him with speculative eyes.  His recent loss had driven him to a towering rage and his voice shook with anger in it.

“Twenty head they’ve took from me,” he spat out angrily.  “Twenty head in one night an’ they think they c’n git away with it an’ go on doin’ jest what they damn please!” He jerked his cinch tight, climbed into his saddle and as his young horse whirled about Thornton saw that he had a rifle under his leg.

“Them cows,” he went on wrathfully, merely ducking his head at the new comer, “will average a hundred dollars a head.  Two thousan’ bucks gone like a fog when the sun’s up!  What in hell do you fellers think I’m payin’ you for?”

“It ain’t goin’ to happen one more time,” growled Bart Elliott, the foreman whose wrath under the direct eyes of the “Old Man” was no less than King’s.  “I jes’ wish they’d try it on again....”

“Ain’t goin’ to happen again, ain’t it?” retorted King.  “That’s got to satisfy me, huh?  Jest so long as they take a couple thousan’ dollars out’n my pockets, an’ then don’t come back for all I got, it’s all right, huh?  Now you boys can jest nacherally take the glue out’n your ears an’ listen a minute:  I’m goin’ to know who took them cows an’ where they went, an’ I’m goin’ to have ’em back, every little cow brute of ‘em!  Git me, Elliott?  An’ you, Jim an’ Hodge?  If you fellers are lookin’ for jobs where you ain’t got nothin’ to do you better look somewhere else.  Now, listen some more.”