had nothing to do
but eat breakfast before they saddled, and found them putting on
overcoats and gloves and wrangling over the probable location of the herd
that would have drifted in the night. So they ploughed in a straggling
group to the house, where Annie-Many-Ponies was already pouring the
coffee when they trooped in.

Day was just breaking when they rode out into the full force of the
belated storm and up on the mesa where they had left the cattle scattered
and feeding more or less contentedly at sundown. They had not gone a mile
until their bodies began to shrink under the unaccustomed cold. Bill
Holmes, town-bred and awkward in the open, thankfully resigned to the
Indian girl the dignity of driving the mountain wagon with its four-horse
team, and huddled under blankets, while Annie-Many-Ponies piloted them
calmly straight across country in the wake of the riders whom her beloved
Wagalexa Conka was leading on the snuffy bay. Save for the difference in
his clothes, Annie-Many-Ponies thought that he much resembled that great
little war-chief of the white people who rode ahead of his column in a
picture hanging on the wall of the mission school. Napoleon was the great
little war-chief's name, and her heart swelled with pride as she drove
steadily through the storm and thought what a great war-chief her brother
Wagalexa Conka might have made, were these but the days of much fighting.

There was to be no trouble with "static" this time, if Luck could help
it. To be doubly safe from blurred film, he had brought his ray filter
along, for the flakes of snow were large and falling fast. He had chosen
a different location, because of the direction of the wind and the
difficulty the boys would have had in driving the cattle back in the face
of it to the side hill where he had first taken the scenes of the
drifting herd.

To-day he "shot" them first as they were filing reluctantly out through a
narrow pass which was supposed to be the entrance to the box canyon where
the two rustlers, Andy and Miguel, had kept them hidden away.
Artistically speaking, the cattle were in perfect condition for such a
scene, every rib showing as they trooped past the clicking camera
cleverly concealed in a clump of bushes; hip bones standing up, lean legs
shambling slowly through the snow that was already a foot deep. Cattle
hidden for days and days in a box canyon would not come out fat and sleek
and stepping briskly, and Luck was well please