oy's life was physically ill-balanced, like an
oarsman's, in that it exercised only certain muscles of the body. The
writer should be turned loose in a branding corral.

Through the wide gates the cattle were urged out to the open plain.
There they were held for over an hour while the cows wandered about
looking for their lost progeny. A cow knows her calf by scent and
sound, not by sight. Therefore the noise was deafening, and the motion
incessant.

Finally the last and most foolish cow found the last and most foolish
calf. We turned the herd loose to hunt water and grass at its own
pleasure, and went slowly back to chuck.

[3] For the benefit of the squeamish it might be well to note that the
fragments of the ears were cartilaginous, and therefore not bloody.

CHAPTER NINE

THE OLD TIMER

About a week later, in the course of the round-up, we reached the
valley of the Box Springs, where we camped for some days at the
dilapidated and abandoned adobe structure that had once been a ranch
house of some importance.

Just at dusk one afternoon we finished cutting the herd which our
morning's drive had collected. The stray-herd, with its new additions
from the day's work, we pushed rapidly into one big stock corral. The
cows and unbranded calves we urged into another. Fifty head of beef
steers found asylum from dust, heat, and racing to and fro, in the mile
square wire enclosure called the pasture. All the remainder, for which
we had no further use we drove out of the flat into the brush and
toward the distant mountains. Then we let them go as best pleased them.

By now the desert bad turned slate-coloured, and the brush was olive
green with evening. The hard, uncompromising ranges, twenty miles to
eastward, had softened behind a wonderful veil of purple and pink,
vivid as the chiffon of a girl's gown. To the south and southwest the
Chiricahuas and Dragoons were lost in thunderclouds which flashed and
rumbled.

We jogged homewards, our cutting ponies, tired with the quick, sharp
work, shuffling knee deep in a dusk that seemed to disengage itself and
rise upwards from the surface of the desert. Everybody was hungry and
tired. At the chuck wagon we threw off our saddles and turned the
mounts into the remuda. Some of the wisest of us, remembering the
thunderclouds, stacked our gear under the veranda roof of the old ranch
house.

Supper was ready. We seized the tin battery, filled the plates