WHEN old Lucius built his ranch house of field stone at the foot of the mountains and furnished it accord ing to the best taste of his time, there had been some who called it Dowling's Folly. He had been one of the first to put in steam heat, ordering his radiators from Chicago and hauling them from Ursula with vast expense and effort.
But when he had finished the ranch became the show place of the county. He had a vast barn, a machine shop, a wagon shed, a salt house where the great cubes of salt were stored for distribution over his ranges. His calf yard was enormous, with its feeding tables and its hay racks. Outside of the barn were his breaking corrals and paddocks, and beyond these again were the feeding yards, one after another, with shelter sheds against the winter snows and a creek for water flowing through them all. Thousands of cattle could old Lucius winter on the home ranch, and these were only the weaklings of his herds. The others, the strong steers, the dry cows, wintered themselves on the range. He had his line camps there, of course, with two or three riders, a cook and a couple of hay shovelers; the line riders rode fence and worked the unthrifty cattle in for feeding, the cook cooked, the hay shovelers shoveled. In bad winters he took a loss, in mild winters he grew rich.
During his later years, after his other interests took him East, he had come only twice a year, in spring for the cow and calf round-up, and in the early fall to ship. Then old Lucius was a happy man; he put on a pair of old Oregon trousers, he thrust his feet—beginning to be gouty—into ancient boots, stuck a battered Stetson on his head and rode out with his boys, as he called them, going like a king to survey his vast domain.
Sometimes he had not even been to bed, for he seldom
