“---- you; I’ll sheep out Rainbow Valley one of these days!”
Old Rory McPherson owned Rainbow Valley and he replied:
“Ye will? Then that will be many a long year after the sheep have made a
vile-smellin’ dust heap out of Antelope.”
And Big Jim Mott owned Antelope range. The feud between Rory and Big Jim
had started before the advent of the branch railroad into Antelope. The
railroad had made old Rory even more bitter.
The logical thing, according to Rory, would have been for the railroad
to have come in through Rainbow Valley, leaving the main line at a point
about three miles north of Claymore, the little village at the upper end
of Rainbow, and following an easy grade down through Rainbow and into
the Antelope country.
But instead, it came in from the town of Welcome, twisted in and out of
the hills, barely touching the lower border of Rainbow and running due
south to Antelope. And old Rory McPherson knew why the railroad did not
come in through Rainbow. He knew that Big Jim’s political pull kept the
railroad out of Rainbow Valley.
It had been of no advantage to Big Jim, and had not injured Rory
McPherson, as far as that was concerned; but a railroad through Rainbow
Valley would have been of decided advantage to Rory. And Rory knew that
Big Jim had done all this with malice aforethought.
“You and your dir-r-rty buildin’!” muttered Rory.
“What did yuh say?” asked Dick Clarey.
“Nawthin’.”
Rory squinted across the street, jerking the brim of his sombrero a
trifle lower, as he spelled out a faded sign--