The Free Range

"I don't want to ruin anybody," puffed old "Beef" Bissell, whose cattle overran most of the range between the Gray Bull and the Big Horn. "But I allow as how them sheep of yours...

After visiting the corral, Larkin paid his respects to the pump and refreshed himself for supper. Then he strolled around the long, rambling ranch house. Across the front, which...

As soon after dinner as possible Larkin disengaged himself from the rest of the party and motioned Caldwell to follow him. He led the way around the house and back toward the fe...

The next morning, after breakfast, which shortly followed the rising of the sun, Bissell called Bud Larkin aside just as that young man had headed for the corral to rope and sad...

The weary herders with Sims and Larkin answered the cry as one man, for they were spent with the exertions of the night, and heavy-eyed from want of sleep. The meal of mutton, c...

The captor on his right relieved him of the useless weapon, and, in a trice, produced a rope, with which he bound the sheepman's arms tightly behind him. With the other end of t...

When Juliet Bissell rode back to the Bar T ranch after her parting with Larkin at the fork of Grass Creek, she was a decidedly more thoughtful and sober young woman than she had...

Breakfast next morning at the Bar T ranch was disturbed by the arrival of a cowboy on a lathering, wicked-eyed pony who announced to Stelton that Bud Larkin and his sheep had cr...

As Bud Larkin jogged along on Pinte, apparently one of the group of men with whom he was riding, he wondered mechanically why his captors insisted on traveling ten miles to a tr...

"I imagined it was they who had done it," said Bud quietly, the full enormity of the thing not yet having sunk deep into his mind. "How did you get mixed up in it?"

At three o'clock the next afternoon Beef Bissell felt better than he had for some time, this condition being a result of his vindictive triumph over Bud Larkin, and the fact tha...

Now that the owner of the Bar T ranch had succeeded again in a match of wits with Larkin, he put sheep out of his mind and turned his attention to the more-immediate danger of r...

Sims cast a practiced eye over the sides of the swelling hills, where already two thousand animals, the second consignment, were feeding. It was now a week since he had met Bud...

Everybody at the Bar T ranch house was laboring under suppressed excitement. It was now the middle of June when the yearly round-up should be under way, yet, owing to the invasi...

To Bud Larkin enough had already happened to make him as philosophical as Socrates. Epictetus remarks that our chief happiness should consist in knowing that we are entirely ind...

What were the feelings of Mr. Mike Stelton that dawn had better be imagined than described. The first he knew of any calamity was when Mrs. Bissell, unable to find her husband n...

Sims, without changing his position, called out to the herders. These in turn spoke to the dogs, and the dogs began to nip the heels of the leader sheep, who resented the famili...

"I allow yuh'll have to put yore gun in the next pot if you want to stick along," he said. "An' if yuh do I'll win it off yuh and get away from here."

By four o'clock in the morning the fifteen hundred head of cattle had crossed the ford of the Big Horn and were bedded down on the other side. When this hazardous business had b...

Utterly exhausted with his day's riding and the stress of his other labors, Bud Larkin, driving his captive, arrived at the sheep camp shortly before sundown. Faint with hunger-...

The occasion when nine men with their hands tied behind them arrived at the Bar T ranch, accompanied by six others with Winchesters across their saddle bows, was an extremely ha...

It was noon and the great column of parched animals and hot, dusty men had come to a halt under their alkali cloud beside a little stream. The foot-weary sheep and cattle, witho...

Darkness had scarcely fallen over the Larkin flocks and herd when the former were set in motion. The bells had been removed and the sheep were urged forward at the fastest possi...

Bud's sleep of exhaustion was ended by the sound of voices calling to one another. So deep had been his unconsciousness that as he slowly struggled back to light and reason he f...

It could not have been later than ten o'clock in the morning when a puncher with sharp eyes might have seen two figures approaching the Bar T ranch house on horseback. They rode...