“Chance followed me to the Concho because I made him come.  He showed that he didn’t want to stay.  I let him go.  If he gets back to you, keep him.  He is yours.

“JOHN CORLISS.”

Sundown folded the note and carefully tucked it in his pocket.  He rose and slapped his chest grandiloquently.  “Chance, ole pal,” he said with a brave gesture, “you’re mine!  Got the dockyments to show.  What do you think?”

Chance, with mouth open and lolling tongue, seemed to be laughing.

Sundown reached out his long arm as one who greets a friend.

The dog extended his muscular fore leg and solemnly placed his paw in Sundown’s hand.  No document was required to substantiate his allegiance to his new master, nor his new master’s title to ownership.  Despite genealogy, each was in his way a thoroughbred.

CHAPTER XIII

SUNDOWN, VAQUERO

The strenuous days of the round-up were over.  Bands of riders departed for their distant ranches leaving a few of their number to ride line and incidentally to keep a vigilant eye On the sheep-camps.

David Loring, realizing that he had been checkmated in the first move of the game in which cattle and sheep were the pawns and cowboys and herders the castles, knights, and, stretching the metaphor a bit, bishops, tacitly admitted defeat and employed a diagonal to draw the cattle-men’s forces elsewhere.  He determined to locate on the abandoned water-hole ranch, homestead it, and, by so doing, cut off the supply of water necessary to the cattle on the west side of the Concho River.  This would be entering the enemy’s territory with a vengeance, yet there was no law prohibiting his homesteading the ranch, the title of which had reverted to the Government.  Too shrewd to risk legal entanglement by placing one of his employees on the homestead, he decided to have his daughter file application, and nothing forbade her employing whom she chose to do the necessary work to prove up.  The plan appealed to the girl for various reasons, one of which was that she might, by her presence, avert the long-threatened war between the two factions.

Sundown and, indirectly, Fadeaway precipitated the impending trouble.  Fadeaway, riding for the Blue, was left with a companion to ride line on the mesas.  Sundown, although very much unlike Othello, found that his occupation was gone.  Assistant cooks were a drug on the range.  He was equipped with a better horse, a rope, quirt, slicker, and instructions to cover daily a strip of territory between the Concho and the sheep-camps.  He became in fact an itinerant patrol, his mere physical presence on the line being all that was required of him.