lf en route to Dry Lake without any trouble at all; a mere matter of
one change of trains and very close connections, the conductor told him.
So Luck went out and found a chair on the observation platform, and gave
himself up to his cigar and to contemplation of the country they were
gliding through. What he would find at Dry Lake to make the stop worth
his while did not worry him; he left that to the future and to the god
Chance whom he professed to serve. He was doing his part; he was going
there to find out what the place held for him. If it held nothing but a
half dozen ex-cow-punchers hopelessly tamed and turned farmers, why,
there would probably be a train to carry him further in his quest. He
would drop down into Wyoming and Arizona and New Mexico,--just keep going
till he did find the men he wanted. That was Luck's way.

The shadows grew long and spread over the land until the whole vast
country lay darkling under the coming night. Luck went in and ate his
dinner, and came back again to smoke and stare and dream. There was a
moon now that silvered the slopes and set wide expanses shimmering.

Luck, always more or less a dreamer, began to people the plain with the
things that had been but were no more: with buffalo and with Indians who
camped on the trail of the big herds. He saw their villages, the tepees
smoke-grimed and painted with symbols, some of them, huddled upon a knoll
out there near the timber line. He heard the tom-toms and he saw the
rhythmic leaping and treading, the posing and gesturing of the braves who
danced in the firelight the tribal Buffalo Dance.

After that he saw the coming of the cattle, driven up from the south by
wind-browned, saddle-weary cowboys who sang endless chanteys to pass the
time as they rode with their herds up the long trail. He saw the cattle
humped and drifting before the wind in the first blizzards of winter,
while gray wolves slunk watchfully here and there, their shaggy coats
ruffled by the biting wind. He saw them when came the chinook, a howling,
warm wind from out the southwest, cutting the snowbanks as with a knife
that turned to water what it touched, and laying bare the brown grass
beneath. He saw the riders go out with the wagons to gather the
lank-bodied, big-kneed calves and set upon them the searing mark of their
owner's iron.

Urged by the spell of the dried little man's plaintive monologue, the old
range lived again for Luck, out there under the moon, whil