gaunt, where should
be sleek content. When they sought to continue their quest beyond the
river, and the weaker bogged at its muddy edge, Rowdy and Pink and
the Silent One would ride out, and with their ropes drag them back
ignominiously to solid ground and the very doubtful joy of living.

May Day found the grass-land brown and lifeless, with a chill wind
blowing over it. The cattle wandered as before except that knock-kneed
little calves trailed beside their lean mothers and clamored for full
stomachs.

The Cross L cattle bore the brunt of the range famine, because Eagle
Creek Smith was a stockman of the old school. His cattle must live on
the open range, because they always had done so. Other men bought or
leased large tracts of grass-land, and fenced them for just such an
emergency, but not he. It is true that he had two or three large fields,
as Miss Conroy had told Rowdy, but it was his boast that all the hay he
raised was eaten by his saddlehorses, and that all the fields he owned
were used solely for horse pastures. The open range was the place for
cattle and no Cross L critter ever fed inside a wire fence.

Through the dry summer before, when other men read the ominous signs
and hurriedly leased pasture-land and cut down their herds to what the
fields would feed, Eagle Creek went calmly on as he had done always.
He shipped what beef was fit--and that, of a truth, was not much!--and
settled down for the winter, trusting to winter snows and spring rains
to refill the long-dry lakes and waterholes, and coat the levels anew
with grass.

But the winter snows had failed to appear, and with the spring came
no rain. "April showers" became a hideously ironical joke at nature's
expense. Always the wind blew, and sometimes great flocks of clouds
would drift superciliously up from the far sky-line, play with men's
hopes, and sail disdainfully on to some more favored land.

It is all very well for a man to cling stubbornly to precedent, but if
he clings long enough, there comes a time when to cling becomes akin to
crime. Eagle Creek Smith still stubbornly held that rangecattle should
be kept to the range. He waited until May was fast merging to June,
watching, from sheer habit, for the spring transformation of brown
prairies into green. When it did not come, and only the coulee sides and
bottoms showed green among the brown, he accepted ruefully the unusual
conditions which nature had thrust upon him, and started "Wood