the cattle trains, rumbling slowly along, the crowded
animals staring stupidly through the bars. They are not having a
particularly hard time, considering the fact that they are undergoing
their first experience in travelling. Nowadays they are not allowed to
become thirsty; and they are too car sick to care about eating. Car
sick? Certainly; just as you or I are car sick, no worse; only we do not
need to travel unless we want to. At the end of the journey, often, they
are too wobbly to stand up. This is not weakness, but dizziness from the
unwonted motion. Once a fool S.P.C.A. officer ordered a number of the
Captain's steers shot on the ground that they were too weak to live.
That greenhorn got into fifty-seven varieties of trouble.

Arrived at their journey's end the steers were permitted to get their
sea legs off; and then were driven slowly to a cattle paradise--the
ranch.

For there was flowing water always near to the thirsty nose; and rich
grazing; and wonderful wagons from which the fodder was thrown
abundantly; and pleasant shade from a mild and beneficent sun. The thin,
wiry beasts of the desert lost their angles; they became fat, and curly
of hair, and sleek of coat, and much inclined to kink up their tails and
cavort off in clumsy buck jumps just from the sheer joy of living. For
now they were, in good truth, beef cattle, the aristocracy of fifty
thousand, the pick of wide ranges, the total tangible wealth of a great
principality. To see them would come red-faced men with broad hats and
linen dusters; and their transfer meant dollars and dollars.

I have told you these things lest you might have concluded that the
Captain did nothing but shoot ducks and quail and ride the polo ponies
around the enclosure. As a matter of fact, the Captain was always going
to Arizona, or coming back, or riding here or driving there. When we
went to the ranch, he looked upon our visit as a vacation, but even then
he could not shoot with us as often as we all would have liked. On the
Arizona range were the [JH] ranch, and the Circle I, and the Bar O, and
the Double R, and the Box Springs, and others whose picturesque names I
have forgotten. To manage them were cowpunchers; and appertaining
thereunto were Chinese cooks, and horses, and pump mules, and grub
lists, and many other things. The ranch itself was even more complicated
an affair; for, as I have indicated, it meant many activities besides
cattle. And then there was the