he estimated. That would take a heavy outlay for wire, granting that he could cut posts in the hills on a permit from the forestry supervisor.
So Rawlins sat with the old flockmaster at the tail of the sheep-wagon, thinking and planning for the—future in what he still thought of as that big white spot of unrevealed opportunities on the map. Only there was one persistent little oasis in it now which no amount of adversity or opposition ever should erase and throw back again into the unchartered desert of white. He saw it all as clearly as if the labor of twenty years lay behind him. There was his oasis, his flocks ranging out from it, his prosperity centered there, all as plain to his far-leaping vision as a thing accomplished.
In fact, there was nothing more than a half-section of what the United States Government designated semi-arid agricultural and grazing land, lying inside a guarded fence that must restrict his coming and going for a long time to come, as it had hampered the free movement of people in that section for many years in the past. Overhead there were stars as bright as youth's untarnished hopes; around him the huddled hills of the sheeplands, silent as a sleeping flock. And there facing him in the gloom of starlight sat old Al Clemmons, a man who had remained little to balance, in the arbitrary apportionment of fate, it seemed, the ambitions of a man who was determined to become big.
The situation did not have its warning for Rawlins, confidently extending his plans, comfortably designing for the homestead inside the fence, for youth believes, always has believed, always shall believe, that excep-
