outside or standing
with noses pressed close against the corral rails.

Not one day and night it lasted, nor two. For four days the uproar
showed no sign of ever lessening, and on the fifth the eighteen
hundred voices were so hoarse that the calves merely whispered their
plaint, gave over in disgust and began nosing the scattered piles
of hay. The cows, urged by hunger, strayed from the blackened circle
around the corrals and went to burrowing in the snow for the ripened
grass whereby they must live throughout the winter. They were driven
forth to the open range and left there, and the Double-Crank settled
down to comparative quiet and what peace they might attain. Half
the crew rolled their beds and rode elsewhere to spend the winter,
returning, like the meadowlarks, with the first hint of soft skies and
green grass.

Jim Bleeker and a fellow they called Spikes moved over to the Bridger
place with as many calves as the hay there would feed, and two men
were sent down to the line-camp to winter. Two were kept at the
Double-Crank Ranch to feed the calves and make themselves generally
useful--the quietest, best boys of the lot they were, because they
must eat in the house and Billy was thoughtful of the women.

So the Double-Crank settled itself for the long winter and what it
might bring of good or ill.

Billy was troubled over more things than one. He could not help seeing
that Flora was worrying a great deal over her father, and that the
relations between herself and Mama Joy were, to put it mildly and
tritely, strained. With the shadow of what sorrow might be theirs,
hidden away from them in the frost-prisoned North, there was no
dancing to lighten the weeks as they passed, and the women of the
range land are not greatly given to "visiting" in winter. The miles
between ranches are too long and too cold and uncertain, so that
nothing less alluring than a dance may draw them from home. Billy
thought it a shame, and that Flora must be terribly lonesome.

It was a long time before he had more than five minutes at a stretch
in which to talk privately with her. Then one morning he came in to
breakfast and saw that the chair of Mama Joy was empty; and Flora,
when he went into the kitchen afterward, told him with almost a
relish in her tone that Mrs. Bridger--she called her that, also with a
relish--was in bed with toothache.

"Her face is swollen on one side till she couldn't raise a dimple to
save her life," she an