I suppose they thought that his orders to range-herd the cattle they had gathered came from the same mood, but they did not seem to mind.  They did whatever he told them to do, and they did it cheerfully,—­which, in the circumstances, is saying a good deal for the Happy Family.  So with the sun warm as early May, and the new grass showing tiny green blade-tips in the sheltered places, they began range-herding two thousand head of cattle that needed all the territory they could cover for their feeding grounds.

The twenty-fifth day of March brought no faintest promise of anything that looked like snow.  Applehead sharpened his hoe and went pecking at the soil around the roots of his grape-vine arbor, thereby irritating Luck to the point of distraction.  He had reached a nervous tension where he could not eat, and he could not sleep, and life looked a nightmare of hard work and disappointments, of hopes luring deceitfully only to crush one at the moment of fulfilment.

It was because he could not sleep, but spent the nights stretched upon his side with his wide-open eyes boring into vacancy and a drab future, that he heard the wind whine over the ridgepole of the squat bunk-house and knew that it had risen from a dead calm since bedtime.  The languor of nervous exhaustion was pulling his eyelids down over his tired eyes, and he knew that it must be nearly morning; for sleep never came to him now until after Applehead’s brown rooster had crowed for two o’clock.

He closed his eyes and dreamed that he was “shooting” blizzard scenes with the snow to his armpits.  He was chilled to the middle of his bones, and his hand went down unconsciously and groped for the blankets he had pushed off in his restlessness.  In his sleep he was yelling to the Cattlemen’s Convention to wait,—­not to adjourn yet, because he had something to show them.

“Well, show’em, dang it, an’ shut up!” muttered Applehead crossly, and turned over on his good ear so that he could sleep undisturbed.

Luck, half awakened by the movement, curled up with his knees close to his chin and went on with his dream.  With the wind still mooing lonesomely around the corners of the house, he slept more soundly than he had slept for weeks, impelled, I suppose, by a subconscious easement from his greatest anxiety.

A slow tap-tap-tapping on the closed door near his head woke him just before dawn.  The lightest sleeper of them all, Luck lifted his head with a start, and opened his sleep-blurred eyes upon blackness.  He called out, and it was the voice of Annie-Many-Ponies that answered.

“Wagalexa Conka!  You come quick.  Plenty snow come.  You be awful glad when you see.  Soon day comes.  You hurry.  I make plenty breakfast, Wagalexa Conka.”

As a soldier springs from sleep when calls the bugle, Luck jumped out into the icy darkness of the room.  With one jerk he had the door open and stood glorying in the wild gust of snow that broke over him like a wave.  In his bare feet he stood there, and felt the snow beat in his face, and said never a word, since big emotions never quite reached the surface of Luck’s manner.