y
outskirts of the camp.

If he had been qualified to weigh motives, the heart that brindle-roan
steer would surely have burst at; the pure effrontery of the thing: not
only must he yield his life and give his body for meat, that those
yearning stomachs might be filled with his flesh; he must deliver that
meat at the most convenient spot, as a butcher brings our chops to the
kitchen door. For that purpose alone they were cunningly luring him
closer and closer, that they need not carry the meat far when they had
slaughtered him.

At least his last moments were lighted with hope. He made one grand,
final dash, tripped in a noose that had somehow dropped neatly in the
way of his front feet, and went down with a crash and a bellow of
dismay. Some one ran lightly in--he did not see that it was the vaquero
he had been pursuing all this time--and drove a dagger into the brain
just back of the horns. Thus that particular gust of rage was wiped out
of existence forever.

Later, when the camp-fires burned low, the pleasant odor of meat
broiling upon the forked ends of long, willow branches over the red
coals, proved how even a brindle steer may, at the last, in every savory
morsel have justified his existence.

Life in those days was painted upon a big canvas, with broad sweep of
brushes dipped in vivid colors. Although the branding of the season's
calves was a matter of pure business, the manner in which that work was
accomplished was a spectacle upon which we of the present generation
would give much to look.

When the sun parted the fog and looked down inquisitively, the whole
valley was pulsing with life, alight with color. The first real work of
the rodeo was beginning, like the ensemble of some vast, spectacular
play; and the stage was managed by Nature herself, creator of the
harmony of colors. The dark, glossy green of live oak, the tender green
of new willow leaves, the pale green of the mustard half buried in the
paler yellow of its blossoms, had here and there a splash of orange and
blue, where the poppies were refusing to give place to the lupines which
April wished to leave for May, when she came smiling to dwell for one
sweet month in the valley. The poppies had had their day. March had
brought them, and then had gone away and left them for the April showers
to pelt and play with; and now, when the redwoods on the mountainsides
were singing that May was almost here, a whole slope of poppies lingered
rebelliou