They never talked politics nor told which candidates received their two votes.

They kept the same two men season after season,--leathery old range hands with eyes that saw whatever came within their field of vision, and with the gift of silence, which is rare.
If you know anything at all about cattlemen, you will know that the Quirt was a poor man's ranch, when I tell you that Hunter and Johnson milked three cows and made butter, fed a few pigs on the skim milk and the alfalfa stalks which the saddle horses and the cows disdained to eat, kept a flock of chickens, and sold what butter, eggs and pork they did not need for themselves.

Cattlemen seldom do that.

More often they buy milk in small tin cans, butter in "squares," and do without eggs.
Four of a kind were the men of the TJ up-and-down, and even Bill Warfield--president and general manager of the Sawtooth Cattle Company, and of the Federal Reclamation Company and several other companies, State senator and general benefactor of the Sawtooth country--even the great Bill Warfield lifted his hat to the owners of the Quirt when he met them, and spoke of them as "the finest specimens of our old, fast-vanishing type of range men." Senator Warfield himself represented the modern type of range man and was proud of his progressiveness.

Never a scheme for the country's development was hatched but you would find Senator Warfield closely allied with it, his voice the deciding one when policies and progress were being discussed.
As to the Sawtooth, forty thousand acres comprised their holdings under patents, deeds and long-time leases from the government.