and Sudden, growing up and falling heir to it all, had added tract after
tract by purchase and lease and whatever other devices a good politician
may be able to command.

Sudden's father had been a simple man, content to run his ranch along
the lines of least resistance, and to take what prosperity came to him
in the natural course of events. Sudden had organized a Company, had
commercialized his legacy, had "married money," and had made money. Far
to the north and to the east and west ran the lines of other great
ranches, where sheep were handled in great, blatting bands and yielded
a fortune in wool. There were hills where Selmer cattle were wild as
deer--cattle that never heard the whistle of a locomotive until they were
trailed down to the railroad to market.

These made the money for Selmer and his Company. But it was the Rolling
R, where the profits were smaller, that stood closest to Sudden's heart.
There was not so much money in horses as there was in sheep; Sudden
admitted it readily enough. But he hated sheep; hated the sound of them
and the smell of them and the insipid, questioning faces of them. And
he loved horses; loved the big-jointed, wabbly legged colts and the
round-bodied, anxious mothers; loved the grade geldings and fillies and
the registered stock that he kept close to home in fenced pastures; loved
the broom-tail bronks that ranged far afield and came in a dust cloud
moiling up from their staccato hoof beats, circled by hoarse, shouting
riders seen vaguely through the cloud.

There was a thrill in watching a corral full of wild horses milling round
and round, dodging the whispering ropes that writhed here and there
overhead to settle and draw tight over some unlucky head. There was a
thrill in the taming--more thrills than dollars, for until the war