s and nights
Billy added a fresh crease to the group between his eyebrows and
deepened the old ones, and Dill rode three horses thin galloping back
and forth between the ranch and the herd, in helpless anxiety.

At last the cars came and the beef, a good deal thinner than it had
been, was loaded and gone, and the two relaxed somewhat from the
strain. The market was lower when that beef reached its destination,
and they did not bring the "top" price which Billy had promised Dill.

So the shipping season passed and Dill made his payment on the
mortgage by borrowing twelve thousand dollars, using a little over two
thousand to make up the deficit in shipping returns and holding the
remainder for current expenses. Truly, the disagreeable element which
would creep in where Billy had least expected scored a point there,
and once more the castle he had builded for himself and Dill and one
other lay in shadow.

CHAPTER XVIII.

_When the North Wind Blows._

November came in with a blizzard; one of those sudden, sweeping whirls
of snow, with bitter cold and a wind that drove the fine snow-flour
through shack walls and around window casings, and made one look
speculatively at the supply of fuel. It was such a storm as brings an
aftermath of sheepherders reported missing with their bands scattered
and wandering aimlessly or else frozen, a huddled mass, in some
washout; such a storm as sends the range cattle drifting, heads down
and bodies hunched together, neither knowing nor caring where their
trail may end, so they need not face that bitter drive of wind and
snow.

It was the first storm of the season, and they told one another it
would be the worst. The Double-Crank wagons were on the way in with a
bunch of bawling calves and cows when it came, and they were forced to
camp hastily in the shelter of a coulee till it was over, and to walk
and lead their horses much of the time on guard that they might not
freeze in the saddle. But they pulled through it, and they got to the
ranch and the corrals with only a few calves left beside the trail
to mark their bitter passing. In the first days of cold and calm that
came after, the ranch was resonant day and night with that monotonous,
indescribable sound, like nothing else on earth unless it be the
beating of surf against a rocky shore--the bawling of nine hundred
calves penned in corrals, their uproar but the nucleus for the
protesting clamor of nine hundred cows circling