Alice stood close beside her horse watching every move with intense interest.

“Who would have thought to look for water there?” she exclaimed.

“I knew we’d find it just as he said,” answered the Texan gravely.  “He was a good man, in his way—­never run off no horses except from outfits that could afford to lose ’em.  Why, they say, he could have got plumb away if he’d shot the posse man that run onto him over by the Mission.  But he knew the man was a nester with a wife an’ two kids, so he took a chance—­an’ the nester got him.”

“How could he?” cried the girl, “after——­”

The Texan regarded her gravely.  “It was tough.  An’ he probably hated to do it.  But he was a sworn-in posse man, an’ the other was a horse-thief.  It was just one of those things a man’s got to do.  Like Jim Larkin, when he was sheriff, havin’ to shoot his own brother, an’ him hardly more’n a kid that Jim had raised.  But he’d gone plumb bad an’ swore never to be taken alive, so Jim killed him—­an’ then he resigned.  There ain’t a man that knows Jim, that don’t know he’d rather a thousan’ times over had the killin’ happen the other way ‘round.  But he was a man.  He had it to do—­an’ he done it.”

Alice shuddered:  “And then—­what became of him, then?”

“Why, then, he went back to ranchin’.  He owns the Bar X horse outfit over on the White Mud.  This here, Owen—­that was his brother’s name—­was just like a son to him.  Jim tried to steer him straight, but the kid was just naturally a bad egg.  Feelin’ it the way he does, a lesser man might of squinted down the muzzle of his own gun, or gone the whiskey route.  But not him.  To all appearances he’s the same as he always was.  But some of us that know him best—­we can see that he ain’t quite the same as before—­an’ he never will be.”

There were tears in the girl’s eyes as the man finished.

“Oh, it’s all wrong!  It’s cruel, and hard, and brutal, and wrong!”

“No.  It ain’t wrong.  It’s hard, an’ it’s cruel, maybe, an’ brutal.  But it’s right.  It ain’t a country for weaklings—­the cow country ain’t.  It’s a country where, every now an’ then, a man comes square up against something that he’s got to do.  An’ that something is apt as not to be just what he don’t want to do.  If he does it, he’s a man, an’ the cow country needs him.  If he don’t do it, he passes on to where there’s room for his kind—­an’ the cow country don’t miss him.  A man earns his place here, it ain’t made for him—­often he earns the name by which he’s called.  I reckon it’s the same all over—­only this is rawer.”

“Here’s the water!  And it is cold and sweet,” called Endicott who had been busily removing the loose rock fragments beneath which the spring lay concealed.

The Texan’s interest centred on matters at hand:  “You Bat, you make a fire when you’ve finished with the horses.”  He turned again to the girl:  “If you’ll be the cook, Win an’ I’ll mud up a catch-basin an’ rustle some firewood while Bat makes camp.  We got to do all our cookin’ at night up here.  A fire won’t show above the rim yonder, but in the daytime someone might see the smoke from ten mile off.”