THE vast empty back country began to show signs of life as shipping time approached, and the railroad in the valley, along which the little towns were strung like beads, awakened to new activity. Locomotives pulled great lines of empty cattle cars and left them, so many here, so many there, on the various side-tracks by the shipping pens. Up in the mountains and North on the Reservation the round-ups were beginning; small informal processions were starting out, the pilot on horseback leading the chuck and bed wagons, cowboys in chaps and gloves, their ropes hung to their saddles, drove ahead of them the remudas of loose horses which were to provide their extra mounts. And in the upland pastures or out on the plains, where the blues and pinks of the spring flowers had given way to the sturdier reds, yellows and purples of the early fall, the cattle stood or moved slowly about, the cows with their calves, the steers, the range bulls with their flat backs and wide heavy heads.
Already the nights were cold. At the early round-ups the night guards came in chilled to thaw their hands over the stove, and to draw their beds into the shelter of the cook-tent. The quaking aspens were bright gold; there was a thin scum of ice on the mountain pools in the mornings. And in the fields the country was threshing its grain. Trucks and wagons, their bodies built high with temporary boardings, rocked and careened along the roads on their way to the railroad or the small red grain elevators along the track. First grade wheat was bringing a dollar and twenty cents a bushel, but the profit was small. The old cow-men turned farmers figured patiently; cost of ploughing, cost of seeding, cost of harvesting and threshing. Even at a dollar twenty
Sometimes a herd on the way to the railroad blocked the
