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The Range Dwellers by B. M. Bower
page 73 of 151 (48%)
After that I got restless again, and every mile the round-up moved south
I took as a special grievance; it put that much greater distance between me
and King's Highway--and I had got to that unhealthy stage where every
mile wore on my nerves, and all I wanted was to moon around that little
butte. I believe I should even have taken a morbid pleasure in watching
the light in her window o' nights, if it had been at all practicable.




CHAPTER VIII

A Fight and a Race for Life.


It was between the spring round-up and the fall, while the boys were
employed in desultory fashion at the home ranch, breaking in new horses
and the like, and while I was indefatigably wearing a trail straight
across country to that little butte--and getting mighty little out of it
save the exercise and much heart-burnings--that the message came.

A man rode up to the corrals on a lather-gray horse, coming from Kenmore,
where was a telephone-station connected from Osage. I read the message
incredulously. Dad sick unto death? Such a thing had never
happened--_couldn't_ happen, it seemed to me. It was unbelievable; not to
be thought of or tolerated. But all the while I was planning and scheming
to shave off every superfluous minute, and get to where he was.

I held out the paper to Perry Potter, "Have some one saddle up Shylock,"
I ordered, quite as if he had been Rankin. "And Frosty will have to go
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