r's face showed that she, too,
had been among the _chollas_; there was cactus in her knees and long
spines bristling from her jaws, but she could stand it, while it was a
matter of life and death to the calf. Every time he came near his
mother she backed away, and whenever he began to nudge for milk she
kicked out wildly. So Hardy roped him and twitched the joint away with
a stick; then he pulled out the thorns one by one and went about his
work.

Selecting a fine-leaved _palo verde_ that grew against the point, he
cleared a way into its trunk and felled it down the hill. He cut a
second and a third, and when he looked back he saw that his labor was
appreciated; the runty cow was biting eagerly at the first tree-top,
and the wobbly calf was restored to his own. As the sound of the axe
continued, a band of tame cattle came stringing down the sandy
riverbed, and before the morning was over there were ten or twenty
derelicts and water-bums feeding along the hillside. In the afternoon
he cut more trees along the trail to Hidden Water, and the next day
when he went to work he found a little band of weaklings there,
lingering expectantly in the shadow of the canyon wall. As the days
went by more and more of them gathered about the water, the lame, the
sick, the crippled, the discouraged, waiting for more trees to be
felled. Then as the feed on the distant ridges grew thinner and the
number of cut trees increased, a great band of them hung about the
vicinity of the ranch house constantly--the herds from Hidden Water
and the river, merged into one--waiting to follow him to the hills.

For a mile up and down the canyon of the Alamo, the _palo verde_ stumps
dotted the hillside, each with its top below it, stripped to the bark
and bared of every twig. As the breathless heat of July came on, Hardy
was up before dawn, hewing and felling, and each day the long line of
cattle grew. They trampled at his heels like an army, gaunt,
emaciated; mothers mooing for their calves that lay dead along the
gulches; mountain bulls and outlaws, tamed by gnawing hunger and
weakness, and the awful stroke of the heat. And every day other bands
of outlaws, driven at last from their native hills, drifted in to
swell the herd. For a month Hardy had not seen a human face, nor had
he spoken to any living creature except Chapuli or some poor cow that
lay dying by the water. When he was not cutting trees on the farther
ridges, he was riding along the river