Rawlins was abroad again early next morning, traveling northward along the senatorial fence, his well-laid plan for beginning the foundation of his fortune thrown into chaos by this wire barrier shutting him from the land of his fervent calculations. Nothing in the corner of a sack would avail against that arbitrary boundary stretched across the frontier of the sheeplands, if the story told by shaggy old Al Clemmons was true.
Clemmons had come with him as far as the fence, which was not more than a mile from the old man's spring, pointing out to him from a hilltop the long line of posts diminishing down to dots in the level distance southward. To the north one could not follow the line so far, the land lying rough and unpromising in that direction.
The old sheepman said the best of the enclosed territory was in the northerly direction, in spite of the sterile and forbidding character it presented opposite his range. A few miles along, a considerable valley began, he said. A creek ran through this, making the paradise of pasturage and water for which the sheepmen of Dry Wood longed.
In that direction also, Clemmons informed the adventurer into Dry Wood, there were several important
