Pinkey was out of the bunk at a bound and around the corner of the cabin, where his suspicions were instantly verified.

"It's a bull!" he shouted. "I thought it. Looks like a thousand head of cattle tramplin' down your wheat-field!"

Wallie turned sick. He could not move for a moment. His air-castles fell so hard he could almost hear them.

"Do you think they've been in long?" he asked, weakly.

"Can't tell till daylight." Pinkey was getting into his clothes hurriedly.

Wallie was now in the doorway and he could make out innumerable dark shapes browsing contentedly in his grain-field.

"What'll we do?" he asked, despairingly.

"Do?" replied Pinkey, savagely, tugging at his boot straps. "I'll send one whur the dogs won't bite him with every ca'tridge. We'll run a thousand dollars' worth of taller off the rest of 'em. Git into your clothes, Gentle Annie, and we'll smoke 'em up proper."

"I don't see how it could happen," said Wallie, his voice trembling. "The fence was good!"

"If it had been twenty feet high 'twould 'a' been all the same," Pinkey answered. "Them cattle was drove in."

"You mean----" Wallie's mouth opened.

"Shore--Canby! It come to my mind last night when I seen that bunch movin'. Pretty coarse work I call it, but he thought you was alone and wouldn't ketch on to it."

"He'll pay for this!" cried Wallie, chokingly.

"You can't do nothin' with him but deal him misery. He's got too much money and pull fer you. Do you know what I think's gnawin' on him?"

"My taking up a homestead----"

"That, too, but mostly because Helene dressed him down for sellin' that locoed team to you. He's jealous."

Even in his despair Wallie felt pleased that any one, especially Canby, should be jealous of him because of Helene Spenceley.

"He aims to marry her," Pinkey added. "I wisht you could beat his time and win yerself a home somehow. I don't think you got any show, but if I was you I'd take another turn around my saddle-horn and hang on. Whenever I kin," kindly, "I'll speak a good word for you. Throw your saddle on your horse and step, young feller. I'm gone!"

The faint hope which Wallie had nursed that the damage might not be so great as he had feared vanished with daylight. Not only was the grain trampled so the field looked like a race course, but panel after panel of the fence was down where the quaking-asp posts had snapped like lead-pencils.

As Pinkey and Wallie surveyed it in the early dawn Wallie's voice had a catch in it when he said finally: "I guess I'm done farming. They made a good job of it."




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