Six men were sent out after beef; and although Dade had many times in Texas done exactly what they were doing, he watched interestedly these Californians at their work.

Cattle were everywhere except in the immediate vicinity of the camp.  Half a mile or so the vaqueros galloped; then two of the leaders singled out a fat, young steer and made after him with their riatas hissing as the rawhide circled over their heads.

A loop dropped neatly over the wide horns, and a moment later the second settled upon the first.  The first man turned and headed towards camp with the steer at his heels, ready at the slightest opportunity to make use of those long, sharp-pointed horns which nature had given him for just such need as this.  The steer quite forgot the man behind, until he made a vicious lunge and was checked by the rope that had hung slack and unnoticed over his back.  Furious, the steer turned and charged resentfully at the caballero who was following him and shouting taunts.  But there again he was checked by the first.

So, charging this way and that; galloping wildly in pursuit of the man who seemed to be fleeing for his life, or wheeling to do battle with the rider who kept just so far in his rear, he was decoyed to the very 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.