put his foot in the stirrup."

And when Bud came to that point in his career when he summed up his past
and found that his chief asset was experience, garnished with a somewhat
worn outfit of pack-saddles, tarps, bridles, chaps, and guns, he sighed
heavily.

The old trails were changing to roads. The local freight intermittently
disgorged tons of harvesting machinery. The sound of the Klaxton was
heard in the land. Despite the times and the manners, Bud's girth
increased insidiously. His hard-riding days were past. Progress marched
steadily onward, leaving an after-guard of homesteaders intrenched
behind miles of barbed-wire fence and mazes of irrigating-ditches. The
once open range was now a chessboard of agricultural endeavor, with the
pawns steadying ploughshares as they crept from square to square until
the opposing cattle king suffered ignominious checkmate, his prerogative
of free movement gone, his army scattered, his castles taken, and his
glory surviving only in the annals of the game.

Incidentally, Bud Shoop had saved a little money, and his large
popularity would have won for him a political sinecure; but he disliked
politics quite as heartily as he detested indolence. He needed work not
half so much as he wanted it.

He had failed as a rancher, but he still held his homestead on the Blue
Mesa, some twenty miles from the town of Jason, an old Mormon settlement
in the heart of the mesa country.

Friday morning at sunup Bud saddled his horse, closed the door of his
cabin on the Blue Mesa, and, whistling to his old Airedale, Bondsman,