The next job, now that he was actually face to face with it, looked not so simple.  He was in a country where, a few years before, his quest for “real boys”—­as he affectionately termed the type nearest his heart—­would have been easy enough.  But before the marching ranks of fence posts and barbed wire, the real boys had scattered.  A more or less beneficent government had not gathered them together, and held them apart from the changing conditions, as it had done with the Indians.  The real boys had either left the country, or had sold their riding outfits and gone into business in the little towns scattered hereabouts, or else they had taken to farming the land where the big herds had grazed while the real boys loafed on guard.

Luck admitted to himself that in the past two years, even, conditions had changed amazingly.  Land was fenced that had been free.  Even the reservation was changed a little.  He threw away that cigarette and lighted another, and turned aggrievedly upon a dried little man who came up with the open expectation of using the truck upon which Luck was sitting uncomfortably.  There was the squint of long looking against sun and wind at a far skyline in the dried little man’s face.  There was a certain bow in his legs, and there were various other signs which Luck read instinctively as he got up.  He smiled his smile, and the dried little man grinned back companionably.

“Say, old-timer, what’s gone with all the cattle and all the punchers?” Luck demanded with a mild querulousness.

The dried little man straightened from the truck handles and regarded Luck strangely.

“My gorry, son, plumb hazed off’n this section the earth, I reckon.  Farmers and punchers, they don’t mix no better’n sheep and cattle.  Why, I mind the time when—­”

The train was late, anyway, and the dried little man sat down on the truck, and fumbled his cigarette book, and began to talk.  Luck sat down beside him and listened, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and a cold cigarette in his fingers.  It was not of this part of the country that the dried little man talked, but of Montana, over there to the west.  Of northern Montana in the days when it was cowman’s paradise; the days when round-up wagons started out with the grass greening the hilltops, and swung from the Rockies to the Bear Paws and beyond in the wide arc that would cover their range; of the days of the Cross L and the Rocking R and the Lazy Eight,—­every one of them brand names to glisten the eyes of old-time Montanans.

“Where would you go to find them boys now?” the dried little man questioned mournfully.  “The Rocking R’s gone into sheep, and the old boys have all left.  The Cross L moved up into Canada, Lord knows how they’re making out; I don’t.  Only outfit in northern Montana I know that has hung together at all is the Flying U. Old man Whitmore, he’s hangin’ on by his eyewinkers to what little range he can, and is going in for thoroughbreds.  Most of his boys is with him yet, they tell me—­”