Four Alberta ranches are the scene of this story. Of these, three were quarter sections of land in Yankee Valley, and the fourth the vast Bar Q, whose two hundred thousand rich acres of grain, hay and grazing lands stretched from the prairie into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where it spread over the finest pastures and the "Chinook"-swept south slopes, where the cattle grazed all winter long as in summer-time, its jealous fingers, like those of a miser who begrudges a pinch of his gold, reaching across into the Indian Reserve.

For many years the Bar Q cattle had had the right of way over the Indian lands, the agents who came and went having found it more profitable to work in the interests of the cowman than in those of mere Indians. As everywhere else in the country thereabouts, including the Indians themselves, the agents soon came under the power, and were swept into the colossal "game," of the owner of the Bar Q, the man known throughout the country as the "Bull."

Few could recall when first the Bull, or to give him his proper name, Bill Langdon, had come into the foothills. His brand had blazed out bold and huge when the railroads were pushing their noses into the new land before the trails were marked. Even at that early period, his covetous eye had marked the Indian cattle, "rolling fat" in the term of the cattle world, and smugly grazing over the rich pasture lands, with the "I. D." (Indian Department) brand upon their right ribs, warning "rustlers" from east, west, south, and north, that the beasts were the property of the Canadian Government.

Little Bull Langdon cared for the Canadian Government and he spat contemptuously at the name. Bull had come in great haste out of Montana, and although he had flouted the laws of his native land, away from it he chose to regard with supreme contempt all other portions of the earth that were not included in the great Union across the line.

His first cattle were "rustled" from the unbranded Indian calves which renegade members of the tribe had driven to convenient forest corrals and traded them to the cowman for the drink they craved. Though the rustling of Indian cattle proved remunerative and easy, Langdon by no means overlooked or despised the cattle of the early pioneers, nor the fancy fat stock imported into the country by the English "remittance men."

Slowly the Bar Q herd grew in size and quality, and as it increased, Bull Langdon acquired life-long leases upon thousands of acres of Government land—Forest and Indian Reserve. Closing in upon discouraged and impoverished homesteaders and pioneers he bought what he could not steal.

Somewhere, somehow, the Bull had come upon a phrase of the early days that appealed vastly to his greedy and vain imagination.

"The cattle on a thousand hills are mine!" he gloated, and roared aloud another favorite boast:

"There ain't no cattle on two or four legs that Bull Langdon fears."

He was a man of gigantic stature, with a coarse, brutal face, and in his expression there was something of the primitive savage.

The name "Bull" had been given him because of his bellowing twice, his great strength and his driving methods with men and cattle. Tyrannical, unprincipled and cruel, Bull was hated and feared. He had fought his way to the top by the sheer force of his raging, dominating personality, and once there he reigned in arrogance without mercy or scruple.

To him cattle and men were much alike. Most men, he asserted, were "scrub" stock, and would come tamely and submissively before the branding iron. Very few were spirited and thoroughbred, and for these the Squeezegate had been invented, in which all who were not "broke," emerged crippled or were killed. Finally there were the mavericks, wild stuff, that escaping the lariat of the cowpuncher, roamed the range unbranded, and for these outlaws the Bull had a measure of respect. There was a double bounty for every head of such stuff rolled into the Bar Q, and quite often the Bull himself would join in the dangerous and exciting business of running them to ground.

If the Bull looked upon men in the same way as on cattle, he had still less respect for the female of the human species. With few exceptions, he would snarl, spitting with contempt, women were all scrub stock, easy stuff that could be whistled or driven to home pastures. A man had but to reach out and help himself to whichever one he wanted.

By some such contemptuous speeches as these he had overruled the alarmed objections with which his proposal had been received by the timid, gentle girl from Ontario, whom he had found teaching in the rural school planted in the heart of the then stern and rigid country. It is true, he had thrown no lariat over the school teacher's neck, for he had no wish to kill the thing he coveted, but the cowmen knew of diabolical traps more ingenious than the Squeezegate in which a girl's unwary feet might be ensnared.

She was an innocent, harmless creature, soft and devoted, the kind that is born to mother things, but Mrs. Langdon had had only dream-things to mother; the babes that came to her with every year were born only to die immediately, as on some barren homestead the mother fought out her agony and longing alone and with no one to minister to their needs.

That was the tragedy of this land in the early days, that in innumerable cases the doctors' help would often come not at all, or come too late to be of any avail.

Time could neither accustom nor compensate the wife of the cattleman to those fearful losses, nor compensate her for them. And each time she would cling to the hope that the Bull would send her, before it was too late, to the city, to Calgary. Those were the years, however, when the Bull had had neither time nor thought for such unimportant things as his wife's troubles. He was the type of man who will sit up all night long with a sick cow, or scour the range in search of a lost one, but look with indifference and callousness upon a woman's suffering, especially if she be his wife. Those were the years when the Bull was building up his herd. He was buying and stealing land and cattle. He was drunk with a dream of conquest and power, intent upon climbing to the top. It was his ambition to become the cattle king of Alberta—the King Pin of the northwest country.

And when the years of power and affluence did come, it was too late to help the cattleman's wife, for Mrs. Langdon had reached the age when she could no longer bear a child. The maternal instinct which dominated her, however, found an outlet in mothering the children of neighboring ranchers, the rosy-cheeked papooses on the little squaws' backs, the rough lads who worked upon the ranch, and she even found room in her heart for Jake, the Bull's half-witted illegitimate son.

Jake was a half-breed, whose infirmity was due to a blow Langdon had dealt him on the day when, as a boy, his mother having died on the Indian Reserve, he had come to the Bar Q and ingenuously claimed the Bull as his father. As far as lay in her power, Mrs. Langdon had sought to atone to the unfortunate half-breed for the father's cruelty, and it was her gentle influence—she was newly married to the Bull at the time—that had prevailed upon him to allow Jake to continue upon the ranch. The boy worked about the house, doing the chores and the wood chopping and the carrying of water. He was slavishly devoted to his stepmother, and kept out of the reach of the heavy hand and foot of the Bull, for whom he entertained a wholesome terror.