hacks you see speckled around are empty. The rest hold
nesters too poor to get outa the country. One or two, that had a little
money, have stuck and gone into sheep. But from here on to Dry Creek
there's nothing ranging but the Flying U brand. Not much--compared to
what the old range used to be--but still it keeps things going. We
throwed a dam across the coulee, up there next the hills, and there's
some fair hay land we're putting water on. We have to winter-feed
practically everything these days. The range just nicely keeps the stock
from snow to snow. I've got pitchfork callouses on my hands I never will
outgrow if I was to fall heir to a billion dollars and never use my hands
again for fifty years except to feed myself. It takes work, believe me!
And if there's anything on earth a puncher hates worse than work, it's
some other kind of work.

"At the Flying U," he went on, looking at Luck pensively, "you'll see the
effect of too many people moved into the range country. If there's
anything more distressing than a baby left without a mother, it's a bunch
of cow-punchers that's outlived their range. Ain't that right?"

"Sure it's right!" Luck's sympathy was absolutely sincere. "How well I
know it! Barbed wire scraped me outa the saddle in Wyoming--barbed wire
and sheep. All there is left for a fellow is to forget it and start a
barber shop or a cigar stand, or else make pictures of the old days, the
way I've been doing. You can get a little fun out of making pictures of
what used to be your everyday life. You can step up on a horse and go
whoopin' over the hills and kinda forget it ain't true." A wistfulness
was in Luck's tone. "You pick out the big minutes from the old days--that
had a whole lot of dust and sun and thirst and hunger in between, when
all's said--you pick out the big minutes, and you bring them to life
again, and sort of push them up close together and leave out most of the
hardships. That's why so many of the old boys drift into pictures, I
reckon. They try to forget themselves in the big minutes."

The two who rode with him were silent for a space. Then the Native
Son spoke drily: "About the biggest minutes we get now come about
meal times."

"Oh, we can get down in the breaks on round-up time and kinda forget the
world's fenced clear 'way round it with barb-wire," Andy bettered the
statement. "But round-up gets shorter every year."

"My next picture," Luck observed artfully and yet with a genuine