So the boys rode on.  Even had they known into what they were riding it is unlikely that they would have turned back.  Had Walt Lampson known of the coming peril he would not have been at the Star Circle, laughingly telling his men of sending Whitey on a wild-goose chase, that would end with his spending a night in the saddle, facing a blinding storm.  Lampson and all the men he could summon would have been heavily armed, dashing at full speed toward the threatened herd.

Buck Milton, the range boss, made a better impression on Whitey than any other man he had seen at the Star Circle.  He was tall, blond, sinewy.  He was thoughtful and serious, and not ill-natured.  He looked like a man who could take a joke which he might not understand any too well, and put up a fight in which he would prove a deadly factor.  In short, he was a character you would look at twice, and Whitey was surprised to find him in the Star Circle outfit.

Hank Dawes handed Buck a letter, which Whitey took to be instructions from Walt Lampson, and Buck read it, talked to Hank a moment, and when Buck rode over to where Whitey waited with Injun, he was smiling.

“There won’t be no cuttin’ out t’day,” he said.  “Too late, for one thing, and for another it’s goin’ t’ storm.  You boys like t’ stay with th’ herd t’night?  Be kinda rough.”

“Why, yes.  We’d like it immensely.  It’ll be a sort of adventure,” Whitey replied.

“Well, some folks might call it that,” said Buck.  “You might stick along with me.”  And he and the boys rode off together.

You must know of the old, old enmity that existed between the cowmen and the sheepmen of those early days of the Western ranges.  In the neighborhood in which Whitey found himself, this enmity was particularly bitter, for more and more had the sheep been encroaching on the plains that the cattlemen regarded as their own.  And the reason for this enmity:  once the white-coated flocks had passed over the land it was dead as a feeding-ground for cattle.

So little wonder that the cattlemen thought of the sheep as pests or vermin, and considered their owners as deadly foes, and in turn were regarded as foes by the sheepmen.  The cattlemen were in possession of most of the ranges, and possession was nine points of the law in a country in which there was little law, except that of the gun.

CHAPTER XIV

THE STAMPEDE

Along the banks of the Yellowstone, where it wended its snakelike course to the Missouri, wandered the massive herds of the Star Circle, and around them rode the cow waddies, the few outriders, keeping their charges from straying, and ever watchful for the dreaded sheep, which had of late sprung up like buffalo grass, and, as Buck Milton expressed it, “in a country that God had made for cows.”

And over the range in like peace grazed the enemy; white-fleeced, soft and downy as doves, and as harmless and innocent.  Of all weapons ever used in warfare the strangest, these living emblems of innocence.  It was a warfare fought far from the public eye.  The men who fought the cattle were little like those bull-fighters of Spain who responded to the applause of thousands.  They acted in the dark, if they could, and for hire, and yet they may have had hearts—­but those who hired them surely had none.