again.

Cheerfully and tunelessly he warbled a cowboy ditty as he packed his
supplies and prepared to go.

"Oh, it's bacon and beans most every day,
I'd as lief be eatin' prairie hay."

While he washed his dishes in the fine sand and rinsed them in the
current of the creek he announced jocundly to a young world glad with
spring:

"I'll sell my outfit soon as I can,
Won't punch cattle for no damn' man."

The tin cup beat time against the tin plate to accompany a kind of
shuffling dance. Jack Roberts was fifty miles from nowhere, alone on the
desert, but the warm blood of youth set his feet to moving. Why should
he not dance? He was one and twenty, stood five feet eleven in his
socks, and weighed one hundred and seventy pounds of bone, sinew, and
well-packed muscle. A son of blue skies and wide, wind-swept spaces, he
had never been ill in his life. Wherefore the sun-kissed world looked
good to him.

He mounted a horse picketed near the camp and rode out to a _remuda_ of
seven cow-ponies grazing in a draw. Of these he roped one and brought it
back to camp, where he saddled it with deft swiftness.

The line-rider swung to the saddle and put his pony at a jog-trot. He
topped a hill and looked across the sunlit mesas which rolled in long
swells far as the eye could see. The desert flowered gayly with the
purple, pink, and scarlet blossoms of the cacti and with the white,
lilylike buds of the Spanish bayonet. The yucca and the prickly pear
were abloom. He swept the panorama with trained eyes. In the distance a
little bunch of antelope was moving down to water in single file. On a
slope two miles away grazed a small herd of buffalo. No sign of human
habitation was written on that vast solitude of space.

The cowboy swung to the south and held a steady road gait. With an
almost uncanny accuracy he recognized all signs that had to do with
cattle. Though cows, half hidden in the brush, melted into the color of
the hillside, he picked them out unerringly. Brands, at a distance so
great that a tenderfoot could have made of them only a blur, were plain
as a primer to him.

Cows that carried on their flanks the A T O, he turned and started
northward. As he returned, he would gather up these strays and drive
them back to their own range. For in those days, before the barbed wire
had reached Texas and crisscrossed it with boundary lines, the cowboy
was a fence more mobile than the wandering stock.

It was p