the herd outside.

Again Rawhide cursed him, and Conniston made no answer, having none to
make. He gave over his place silently at Rawhide's surly order and
rode over to aid Toothy. And he marveled at the ease with which
Rawhide did the thing which he himself had found simple from a
distance and impossible near at hand.

At last, behind the scattering herd of running cattle, they left the
corrals and the Lone Dog men behind, and began their drive forty miles
to the Sunk Hole. Now a man must be a hundred places at the same time.
In twenty minutes the three horses were wet and dripping with sweat.
The herd was one which ordinarily, when there was not so much
requiring to be done at once on the ranges, half a dozen men would
have handled. The steers were wild; they were as stubborn as hogs;
there was no narrow, fenced-in road to keep them in the way they
should go. They broke back again and again; they turned off to right
and left by ones and twos, by scores. While Conniston galloped after
one of them that had left the others and broken into a run to the
right the main part of the herd over which he should have been
watching took advantage of the opportunity to lose themselves in the
timbered gulches to the left. Both Rawhide Jones and Toothy had to
ride with him to drive them out of the gulches and back to the herd.

Conniston learned that day how a cattle-man can swear--and why. He
learned that a steer is not the easiest thing in the world to handle,
that sometimes he is not content with fleeing from his natural enemy,
but charges with lowered horns and froth-dripping mouth upon man and
horse. He learned many, many little things that day, and some big
things. And the biggest thing came to him suddenly, and brought a look
into his eyes which had never been there before. He learned that Greek
Conniston, the son of William Conniston, of Wall Street, was the most
inefficient man upon the range.

CHAPTER VIII

Day followed day in an endless round of range duties, and two weeks
had passed since Greek Conniston began work for the Half Moon outfit.
He admitted to himself over many a solitary pipeful of cheap tobacco
that Miss Argyl Crawford had been the reason for his coming out into
the wilderness. And he asked himself what good his coming had done. He
had not so much as caught a fleeting glimpse of her since her father
had engaged him to go to work at thirty dollars a month. He did not
even know that she was stil