The next morning the Mildini Troupe went on its way across the lonely prairie, and Whitey watched the departure with regret.  He would have liked to travel farther with that troupe.

The owner of the Hanley Ranch seldom came there.  He lived in the East, leaving the affairs of the place entirely in the hands of a manager named Gilbert Steele.  It was a common saying in that part of the country that “Gil Steele was as hard as his name.”  He was an ambitious and an active man, and regarded every dollar wrung out of the ranch for its owner as a sort of triumph for himself.

There are men who are successful only when working for others; whose every independent effort is a failure.  Steele was such a man, and that made him bitter, but none the less energetic.  He acted not only as manager, but as foreman of the ranch, which included two sections, twelve hundred and eighty acres.  And he had many enemies.

Perhaps you have wondered at that queer audience in the barn, and why threshing-time should bring it together.  In those days in the West threshing-time was an era of prosperity, and twenty-five or thirty men would band together and buy a threshing-machine.  They owned plenty of horses, and they would go from ranch to ranch with this machine, and thresh the grain.  Now, this threshing-time being of short duration, it drew into it men whose occupations were entirely different at other times of the year.  Hence, the bartenders, hold-up men, cowpunchers—­whom it would be fatal to ask where they came from—­the blacksmiths, and the store-keepers.

Gil Steele had been at the Bar O, so Whitey was known to him, and he supposed that the boy had come merely to see the show.  So Gil was rather surprised, the next morning, when Whitey asked for a job for himself and for Injun.

“What do you want to work for?” Steele demanded.  “Your father’s got plenty o’ money.”

Whitey’s real reason was that he wanted to be among the men to watch Dorgan, but he equivocated—­which is a pretty way of saying that he told a white lie.

“Bill Jordan thinks I’m a softy,” Whitey replied.  “He’s trying to make it so hard for me that I’ll be glad to go back to school.  And I want to show Bill that I’m not afraid of work.”  You see, there was enough truth in this to keep Whitey’s conscience from aching.

“All right,” said Steele.  “More hands mean quicker work and more money.  But I never heard of an Injun wanting to work before.”

“Tame Injun,” Injun said solemnly, which was as near a joke as he ever came in the years Whitey knew him.

This work came under the head of what a fellow doesn’t really have to do, and everybody knows the difference between that and labor that a fellow does have to do—­about the same difference that there is between work and fun.  The threshing-machine was run by horse power.  You remember Felix, the jack that Whitey rode across the prairie, and Felix’s job of turning the little grinding-mill?  The horses had the same sort of job, except that there were teams of them, revolving around a central pivot, that furnished the power that worked the great machine in whose maw sheaves of wheat were fed, to come out as grain.