oad on a fine morning; but he
came very near taking a shot at that particular lark, as if it were
personally responsible for the sunny days that had brought it out
scouting ahead of its kind.

On the twenty-third the sky was a brassy blue, and Applehead won Luck's
fierce enmity by remarking that he "calc'lated he'd better get his garden
in." Luck went away off somewhere on the snuffy little bay, that day, and
did not return until after dark.

On the twenty-fourth he took the boys away back on the mesa, where the
mountains shoulder the plain, and scattered them on a wide circle,
rounding up the cattle that had been permitted to drift where they would
in their famished search for the scant grass-growth. Bill Holmes and the
camera followed him in the buckboard with the lunch, and Luck, when the
boys had met with their gleanings, "shot" two or three short scenes of
poor cows and their early calves, which would go to help along his range
"atmosphere." To the Happy Family it seemed a waste of horseflesh to comb
a twenty-mile radius of mesa to get a cow and calf which might have been
duplicated within a mile of the ranch. The Happy Family knew that Luck
was wading chin deep in the slough of despond, and they decided that he
kept them riding all day just for pure cussedness.

I suppose they thought that his orders to range-herd the cattle they had
gathered came from the same mood, but they did not seem to mind. They
did whatever he told them to do, and they did it cheerfully,--which, in
the circumstances, is saying a good deal for the Happy Family. So with
the sun warm as early May, and the new grass showing tiny green
blade-tips in the sheltered places, they began range-herding two
thousand head of cattle that needed all the territory they could cover
for their feeding grounds.

The twenty-fifth day of March brought no faintest promise of anything
that looked like snow. Applehead sharpened his hoe and went pecking at
the soil around the roots of his grape-vine arbor, thereby irritating
Luck to the point of distraction. He had reached a nervous tension where
he could not eat, and he could not sleep, and life looked a nightmare of
hard work and disappointments, of hopes luring deceitfully only to crush
one at the moment of fulfilment.

It was because he could not sleep, but spent the nights stretched upon
his side with his wide-open eyes boring into vacancy and a drab future,
that he heard the wind whine over the ridgepole