k huddled trembling in their
homes, a mute agony of fear racking their small bodies. Only the creek
and the lazy, wide-mouthed coulee and the trailing clouds and the soft
wind seemed not to mind.

Came another sunrise and with it the clamor, the voices, the rattle of
riding gear, the trampling. Then a final burst and rattle, a dying of
sounds in the distance, a silence as the round-up swept on over the
range-land, miles away to the next camping place. Then the little
prairie folk--the gopher, the plump-bodied prairie dogs, the mice and
the rabbits, would listen long before they crept timidly out to sniff
suspiciously the still-tainted air and inspect curiously and with
instinctive aversion the strange marks left on the earth to show that
it was all something more than a horrible nightmare.

So, under cloud and sun, when the wind blew soft and when it raved
over the shrinking land, when the cold rain drove men into their
yellow slickers and set horses to humping backs and turning tail to
the drive of it and one heard the cook muttering profanity because the
wood was wet and the water ran down the stovepipe and hungry men must
wait because the stove would not "draw," the Double-Crank raked the
range. Horses grew lean and ill-fitting saddles worked their wicked
will upon backs that shrank to their touch of a morning. Wild range
cattle were herded, a scared bunch of restlessness, during long, hot
forenoons, or longer, hotter afternoons, while calves that had
known no misfortune beyond a wet back or a searching wind learned,
panic-stricken, the agony of capture and rough handling and
tight-drawn ropes and, last and worst, the terrible, searing iron.

There were not so many of them--these reluctant, wild-eyed pupils
in the school of life. Charming Billy, sitting his horse and keeping
tally of the victims in his shabby little book, began to know the
sinking of spirit that comes to a man when he finds that things
have, after all, gone less smoothly than he had imagined. There were
withered carcasses scattered through the coulee bottoms and upon side
hills that had some time made slippery climbing for a poor, weak cow.
The loss was not crippling, but it was greater than he had expected.
He remembered certain biting storms which had hidden deep the grasses,
and certain short-lived chinooks that had served only to soften the
surface of the snow so that the cold, coming after, might freeze it
the harder.

It had not been a har