“But can you hide ten thousand sheep?”

“If that fellow tries to levy on my sheep, I’ll about murder him,” Farrel declared.  “But we’re crossing our bridges before we come to them.”

“So we are, Don Mike.  Tell me all about this ancient feud with Andre Loustalot.”

“Certainly.  Twenty-five-odd years ago, this county was pestered by a gang of petty cow-thieves.  They’d run lots of from ten to twenty fat steers off the range at a time, slaughter them in El Toro, and bury the hides to conceal the identity of the animals—­the brands, you understand.  The meat they would peddle to butchers in towns along the railroad line.  The ringleader owned a slaughter-house in El Toro, and, for a long time, nobody suspected him—­the cattle were driven in at night.  Well, my father grew weary of this form of old-fashioned profiteering, and it seemed to him that the sheriff of San Marcos County was too great a simpleton to do anything about it.  So my father stood for the office as an independent candidate and was elected on a platform which read, ‘No steers’ taken off this ranch without permission in writing from the owner.’  Within six months, dad had half a dozen of our prominent citizens in San Quentin Penitentiary; then he resigned the office to his chief deputy, Don Nicolas Sandoval, who has held it ever since.

“Now, during that political campaign, which was a warm and bitter one, Andre Loustalot permitted himself the privilege of libeling my father.  He declared in a public address to a gathering of voters in the San Carpojo valley that my father was a crook, the real leader of the rustlers, and merely seeking the office of sheriff in order to protect the cow-thieves.  When the campaign ended, my father swore to a warrant charging Loustalot with criminal libel and sued him for one hundred thousand dollars damages.  A San Marcos County jury awarded my father a judgment in the sum prayed for.  Loustalot appealed the case to the Supreme Court, but inasmuch as there wasn’t the slightest doubt of his guilt, the higher court affirmed the decision of the Superior Court.

“Loustalot was a poor man in those days.  He was foreman of a sheep outfit, with an interest in the increase of the flock, and inasmuch as these Basques seldom reduce their deals to writing, the sheriff could never satisfy himself that Loustalot had any assets in the shape of sheep.  At any rate, the Basque and his employer and all of his Basque friends denied that Loustalot had any assets.

“For twenty-five years, my father has, whenever the statute of limitations threatened to kill this judgment, revived it by having Loustalot up on an order of court to be questioned regarding his ability to meet the judgment; every once in a while my father would sue out a new writ of execution, which would be returned unsatisfied by the sheriff.  Six months ago, my father had the judgment revived by due legal process, and, for some reason best known to himself,