DALE FINDLAY, superintendent of the Diamond Tail, came riding in with five of his men shortly after the arrival of Barrett and Nearing at the cow camp. Seven more cowboys came straggling along an hour or two later, keeping the cook rattling his pots to serve their famished demands.
Barrett looked for his friend, Dan Gustin, among each group of arrivals, to meet disappointment in every ease. The cook, a one-legged Mexican, Alvino by name, said Dan was working out of Eagle Rock camp. He supposed he was too far away to make it in that night.
Barrett regretted this, for in Dan he felt that he had a passport to the toleration, if nothing more, of these saddle-weary men, who accepted his presence in camp with supreme indifference. Nearing had not gone to the trouble to introduce his charge to anybody but Findlay.
Findlay had not granted him so much as the grace of a word; his friendly hand had been overlooked with a cold aloofness that was more than disdain. One glance the superintendent had spared him, as he might have looked casually at a rock. There was no acknowledgment of even the kinship of kind in his indifferent eyes.
The cowboys were little behind their boss. Barrett felt the barrier that stood between him and them as palpably as if it were a hedge. He caught some of them
