“Did you look all over?  Behind the bar?” Edwards asked, slowly.  “He can’t get out of town through that cordon you’ve got strung around it, an’ he ain’t nowhere else.  Leastwise, I couldn’t find him.”

“Come on back!” excitedly exclaimed Johnny, turning towards the door.  “You didn’t look behind the bar!  Come on—­bet you ten dollars that’s where he is!”

“Mebby yo’re right, Kid,” replied Hopalong, and the marshal’s nodding head decided it.

In the saloon there was strong language, and Jack Quinn, expert skinner of other men’s cows, looked inquiringly at the proprietor.  “What’s up now, Harlan?”

The proprietor laughed harshly but said nothing—­taciturnity was his one redeeming trait.  “Did you say cigars?” he asked, pushing a box across the bar to an impatient customer.  Another beckoned to him and he leaned over to hear the whispered request, a frown struggling to show itself on his face.  “Nix; you know my rule.  No trust in here.”

But the man at the far end of the line was unlike the proprietor and he prefaced his remarks with a curse. “I know what’s up!  They want Jerry Brown, that’s what!  An’ I hopes they don’t get him, the bullies!”

“What did he do?  Why do they want him?” asked the man who had wanted trust.

“Skinning.  He was careless or crazy, working so close to their ranch houses.  Nobody that had any sense would take a chance like that,” replied Boston, adept at sleight-of-hand with cards and very much in demand when a frame-up was to be rung in on some unsuspecting stranger.  His one great fault in the eyes of his partners was that he hated to divvy his winnings and at times had to be coerced into sharing equally.

“Aw, them big ranches make me mad,” announced the first speaker.  “Ten years ago there was a lot of little ranchers, an’ every one of ’em had his own herd, an’ plenty of free grass an’ water for it.  Where are the little herds now?  Where are the cows that we used to own?” he cried, hotly.  “What happens to a maverick-hunter now-a-days?  By God, if a man helps hisself to a pore, sick dogie he’s hunted down!  It can’t go on much longer, an’ that’s shore.”

Cries of approbation arose on all sides, for his auditors ignored the fact that their kind, by avarice and thievery, had forever killed the occupation of maverick-hunting.  That belonged to the old days, before the demand for cows and their easy and cheap transportation had boosted the prices and made them valuable.

Slivers Lowe leaped up from his chair.  “Yo’re right, Harper!  Dead right! I was a little cattle owner once, so was you, an’ Jerry, an’ most of us!” Slivers found it convenient to forget that fully half of his small herd had perished in the bitter and long winter of five years before, and that the remainder had either flowed down his parched throat or been lost across the big round table near the bar.  Not a few of his cows were banked in the east under Harlan’s name.