was the ranch, its white buildings gleaming in the early morning sun. Tiny dot-like figures moved here and there, but too far away for identification.
He sat there for a long time, while the buckskin grazed along the side of the trail and the Miller drowsed on his feet.
Then he turned and went on. The trail wound along, steadily climbing. Now it lay through some upland valley; again it hugged the bare face of a cliff, and at such times the buckskin went warily, for fear the pack would strike the granite wall and overthrow it. He had taken a short cut, not the broader and easier cattle route, and by noon he was high in the range. For the lunch hour he unsaddled, hobbling the pack horse but turning the Miller loose, and himself lying flat on the earth, his face turned up to the sky.
What did life hold for him anyhow? He was twenty-eight, and he was still a cow-hand. That was all he knew.
A bit of schooling, riding or walking miles through the snow to a small frame school house; snowed in on the range, with the cattle drifting before blizzards and freezing to death overnight, a trip once to Omaha with a load of cattle; some exhibition riding and first or second money, with luck—that had been his life so far.
And even that could not go on indefinitely. There was an age limit to his work. There came a time when a man could no longer ride in the teeth of the northwestern blizzards, his saddle blanket and latigo frozen stiff and icicles hanging from the horse's bridle. Or drift to some new "stamping ground" in Arizona or New Mexico, exchanging the icy North for the deserts and heat and cactus of the South.
Then what?
At one o'clock he grunted—he was still stiff from the riding at the Fair and the fight with Little Dog—and with a set face he started off again. He was putting as many miles as possible between Kay and himself.
But he was a cow-man as well as a lover. As he rode his quick eye automatically searched groves of evergreen trees. No coulee with brush, no grove offering shelter, or
