Ten dollars in all. His
heritage, saved to him by Bill Royce.
"Bill, old man," he said slowly, "you've taught me how to play the
game. Pray God I can be as white with a pardner as you have been."
And, crumpling the notes with a sudden gesture, he thrust them into his
pocket.
CHAPTER VII
THE OLD MOUNTAIN LION COMES DOWN FROM THE NORTH
It was perhaps eight o'clock, the morning blue, cloudless, and still.
Packard had conferred briefly with Barbee; the Ranch Number Ten men had
gone about their work. Steve and Bill Royce, riding side by side, had
mounted one of the flat, treeless hills in the upper valley and were
now sitting silent while Royce fumbled with his pipe and Steve sent a
long, eager look down across the open meadow-lands dotted with grazing
cattle.
Suddenly their two horses and the other horses browsing in a lower
field, jerked up their heads, all ears pricked forward. And yet Steve
had heard no sound to mar the perfect serenity of the young day. He
turned his head a little, listening.
Then, from some remote distance there floated to him a sound strangely
incongruous here in the early stillness, a subdued screech or scream, a
wild, clamorous, shrieking noise which for the life of him he could not
catalogue.
It was faint because it came across so great a distance and yet it was
clear; it was not the throbbing cry of a mountain lion, not the scream
of a horse stricken with its death, nothing that he had ever heard, and
yet it suggested both of these sounds.
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