ses, no colt, it seemed, having
been ridden on the place in the memory of man.

She didn't know; taking one thing with another, sometimes she almost
wished that the world was going to stay unsafe for democracy.

Of course this technically described bad year wasn't so bad one way,
because the sheepmen would sure get a tasty wallop, sheep being mighty
informal about dying with the weather below zero and scant feed. When
cattle wasn't hardly feeling annoyed sheep would lie down and quit
intruding on honest cattle raisers for all time. Just a little attention
from a party with a skinning knife was all they needed after that. And so
on, back to Homer Gale, who had gone to Red Gap for two days on a matter
of life and death--and of this the less repeated here the better.

Now our narrow way spread to a valley where the sun's rays were more
widely diffused and the dust less pervasive. We could see a mile ahead
to a vaster cloud of dust. This floated over a band of Arrowhead cattle
being driven in from a range no longer sustaining. They were being driven
by Bolsheviki, so my informant disclosed.

We halted above the road and waited for the dusty creatures to plod by us
down to the pleasant lea where feed was still to be had and water was
sweet. Then came the Bolshevik rear guard. It consisted of Silas
Atterbury and four immature grandchildren.

Grandpa Atterbury was ninety-three and doing his first labour since he
retired, at eighty-five. The grandchildren, two male and two female,
should have been playing childish games. And they were Bolsheviki,
all because they had refused to bring in this bunch of stock except
for the wage customarily paid to trained adults. Even the youngest,
known as Sissy Atterbury, aged eight and looking younger, despite her
gray coating of powdered alkali, had tenaciously held out for a grown
man's pay, which made her something even worse than a Bolshevik; it
made her an I.W.W.

But, as Ma Pettengill said, what could a lady do when Fate had a
stranglehold on her. There was, indeed, nothing to do but tell Sissy to
tell one of her incendiary brothers to get up close to grandpa, and yell
good and loud at him, and make him understand he was to get a count on
that bunch at the first gate, because it didn't look to us that there was
over three hundred head where there ought to be at least five hundred.

And then there was nothing to do but ride ahead of the toiling beasts
and again down the narrow way