CHAPTER VIII.
A Fight and a Race for Life.
It was between the spring round-up and the fall, while the boys were employed in desultory fashion at the home ranch, breaking in new horses and the like, and while I was indefatigably wearing a trail straight across country to that little butte--and getting mighty little out of it save the exercise and much heart-burnings--that the message came.
A man rode up to the corrals on a lather-gray horse, coming from Kenmore, where was a telephone-station connected from Osage.

I read the message incredulously.

Dad sick unto death?
Such a thing had never happened--_couldn't_ happen, it seemed to me.

It was unbelievable; not to be thought of or tolerated.

But all the while I was planning and scheming to shave off every superfluous minute, and get to where he was.
I held out the paper to Perry Potter, "Have some one saddle up Shylock," I ordered, quite as if he had been Rankin.