gather up the stock an' sell it. The Government wants hosses now. There's some talk about a war with Spain, over that Maine sinkin'.
"Yuh know all about the bank, an' they know you. So long. It mebbe will be six months or more till I'm back, but I'm countin' on yuh, Sam Hardy."
"I'll be waitin', Jim," said the foreman, shaking hands.
"Would yuh—shake with me, too—Boss?" asked a youthful voice. Rosebud Joe was there beside the wagon, hat off. His face was red, but he was sort of wistful, too. Big Jim was just about the whole horizon and moon and stars to Joe in those days.
"You bet," said Big Jim, holding out his immense hand, and clasping the thinner but more calloused paw of the boy. "You stick with the old ranch, and with Sam, youngster. "I'll make yuh a tophand when I come back!"
With the Chinese cook, Rosebud Joe started then to run the big ranch. Fortunately it was summer. Also fortunately the horse herd was smaller than it had been for years. For misfortune continued to mount. Big Jim had promised to send out two or three hands to help Sam Hardy. The owner actually paid three men, bar loungers at Miles City, to go to the ranch. The three promptly took train for Seattle, hungry for a look at the land of gold far north. With their meager capital and more meager mental equipment, they probably got nowhere, but the ranch never heard of them.
And Sam Hardy was a sick man. Somehow his foot had developed an infection, in spite of the caustics applied to the stump of toe. The flesh of the foot swelled, turned red, then green and black.
Rosebud Joe swore softly in horror the first time he saw it without bandages, as Sam was soaking it in hot water.
"You gotta go to a doc, too, Sam!" breathed the button. "C'mon, I wouldn't waste no time. That looks bad. Yuh might lose a foot!"
"The ranch can't run itself," denied Sam Hardy doggedly.
But next morning his whole leg ached. He took a look at the foot, groaned, and gave up. Ride in with me, Joe," he asked. "I—I cain't stand this no longer. Yuh'll have to do best yuh can with the hosses. Drive in an' sell what yuh can get together. The rest 'll go to the Injuns, I guess."
When after that long and painful trip, during which the foreman began to talk wildly in fever delirium, Rosebud Joe found he would have to leave the foreman in the cottage hospital. Sam Hardy was sure to lose at least his foot. Maybe his whole leg—or his life. Shaken, grim faced, but resolutely facing a future which must have struck terror into even his soul of loyalty, Rosebud Joe rode back to the ranch which six months before had employed seven men and a cook, besides himself.
Now even the Chinaman had taken his departure. Rosebud Joe was alone, at the age of eighteen, upon a ranch which still represented an investment of more than fifty thousand dollars—twenty-five thousand of which was left in valuable brood mares and stallions.
Left, that is, if the Indians or Redbird had made no new depredations in his absence!
"I gotta do m' best—for Big Jim an' Sam," he said often aloud as he went about the manifold duties. That was his credo. From that time on he heard nothing at all from the two men. But
