is own particular "drifter," eyed the clouds
appraisingly and swung into the saddle for a fifteen-mile ride to the
home ranch and his wife, the Little Doctor. "You can make it, all
right, if yuh half try," he encouraged. "It isn't going to cut loose
before dark, if I know the signs. Better put your jaw in a sling,
Happy--you're liable to step on it. Cheer up! to-morrow's the Day we
Celebrate in letters a foot high. Come early and stay late, and
bring your appetites along. Fare-you-well, my brothers." He rode
away in the long lope that eats up the miles with an ease astonishing
to alien eyes, and the Happy Family rolled a cigarette apiece and
went back to work rather more cheerful than they had been.

Pleasure, the pleasure of wearing good clothes, dancing
light-footedly to good music and saying nice things that bring smiles
to the faces of girls in frilly dresses and with brown, wind-tanned
faces and eyes ashine, comes not often to the veterans of the
"Sagebrush Cavalry." They were wont to count the weeks and the days,
and at last the hours until such pleasure should come to them. They
did not grudge the long circles, short sleeps and sweltering hours at
the branding, which made such pleasures possible--only so they were
not, at the last, cheated of their reward.

Every man of them--save Pink--had secret thoughts of some particular
girl. And more than one girl, no doubt, would be watching, at the
picnic, for a certain lot of white hats and sun-browned faces to
dodge into sight over a hill, and looking for one face among the
group; would be listening for a certain well-known, well-beloved
chorus of shouts borne faintly from a distance--the clear-toned,
care-naught whooping that heralded the coming of Jim Whitmore's Happy
Family.

To-morrow they would be simply a crowd of clean-hearted, clean-limbed
cowboys, with eyes sunny and untroubled as a child's, and laughs that
were good to hear and whispered words that were sweet to dream over
until the next meeting. (If you ask the girls of the range-land, and
believe their verdict, cowboys make the very best and most piquant of
lovers.) Tomorrow there would be no hint of the long hours in the
saddle, or the aching muscles and the tired, smarting eyes. They
might, if pressed, own that they burnt the earth getting there, but
the details of that particular conflagration would be far, far behind
them--forgotten; no one could guess, to-morrow, that they were ever
hot