They fed upon the brow of the hill opposite the ranch buildings; they squeezed under the fence and spilled a ragged fringe of running, gray animals down the slope.

Half a mile away though the nearest of them were, the murmur of them, the smell of them, the whole intolerable presence of them, filled the Happy Family with an amazed loathing too deep for words.
Technically, that high, level stretch of land bounding Flying U coulee on the south was open range.

It belonged to the government.

The soil was not fertile enough even for the most optimistic of "dry land" farmers to locate upon it; and this was before the dry-land farming craze had swept the country, gathering in all public land as claims.

J.G.Whitmore had contented himself with acquiring title to the whole of the Flying U coulee, secure in his belief that the old order of things would not change, in his life-time, at least, and that the unwritten law of the range land, which leaves the vicinity of a ranch to the use of the ranch owner, would never be repealed by new customs imposed by a new class of people.
Legally, there was no trespassing of the Dots, beyond the two or three hundred which had made their way through the fence.