hes this daily
scene was repeated. All these cattle belonged to the man, great by
reason of his priority in the country, the balance of his even
character, and the grim determination of his spirit.

When he had first entered Soda Springs Valley his companions had called
him Buck Johnson. Since then his form had squared, his eyes had
steadied to the serenity of a great authority, his mouth, shadowed by
the moustache and the beard, had closed straight in the line of power
and taciturnity. There was about him more than a trace of the Spanish.
So now he was known as Senor Johnson, although in reality he was
straight American enough.

Senor Johnson lived at the home ranch with a Chinese cook, and Parker,
his foreman. The home ranch was of adobe, built with loopholes like a
fort. In the obsolescence of this necessity, other buildings had
sprung up unfortified. An adobe bunkhouse for the cow-punchers, an
adobe blacksmith shop, a long, low stable, a shed, a windmill and
pond-like reservoir, a whole system of corrals of different sizes, a
walled-in vegetable garden--these gathered to themselves cottonwoods
from the moisture of their being, and so added each a little to the
green spot in the desert. In the smallest corral, between the stable
and the shed, stood a buckboard and a heavy wagon, the only wheeled
vehicles about the place. Under the shed were rows of saddles, riatas,
spurs mounted with silver, bits ornamented with the same metal, curved
short irons for the range branding, long, heavy "stamps" for the corral
branding. Behind the stable lay the "pasture," a thousand acres of
desert fenced in with wire. There the hardy cow-ponies sought out the
sparse, but nutritious, bunch grass, sixty of them, beautiful as
antelope, for they were the pick of Senor Johnson's herds.

And all about lay the desert, shimmering, changing, many-tinted,
wonderful, hemmed in by the mountains that seemed tenuous and thin,
like beautiful mists, and by the sky that seemed hard and polished like
a turquoise.

Each morning at six o'clock the ten cow-punchers of the home ranch
drove the horses to the corral, neatly roped the dozen to be "kept up"
for that day, and rewarded the rest with a feed of grain. Then they
rode away at a little fox trot, two by two. All day long they
travelled thus, conducting the business of the range, and at night,
having completed the circle, they jingled again into the corral.

At the ten other ranches this