As luck would have it, then,—­and no pun intended, please,—­he found himself en route to Dry Lake without any trouble at all; a mere matter of one change of trains and very close connections, the conductor told him.  So Luck went out and found a chair on the observation platform, and gave himself up to his cigar and to contemplation of the country they were gliding through.  What he would find at Dry Lake to make the stop worth his while did not worry him; he left that to the future and to the god Chance whom he professed to serve.  He was doing his part; he was going there to find out what the place held for him.  If it held nothing but a half dozen ex-cow-punchers hopelessly tamed and turned farmers, why, there would probably be a train to carry him further in his quest.  He would drop down into Wyoming and Arizona and New Mexico,—­just keep going till he did find the men he wanted.  That was Luck’s way.

The shadows grew long and spread over the land until the whole vast country lay darkling under the coming night.  Luck went in and ate his dinner, and came back again to smoke and stare and dream.  There was a moon now that silvered the slopes and set wide expanses shimmering.

Luck, always more or less a dreamer, began to people the plain with the things that had been but were no more:  with buffalo and with Indians who camped on the trail of the big herds.  He saw their villages, the tepees smoke-grimed and painted with symbols, some of them, huddled upon a knoll out there near the timber line.  He heard the tom-toms and he saw the rhythmic leaping and treading, the posing and gesturing of the braves who danced in the firelight the tribal Buffalo Dance.

After that he saw the coming of the cattle, driven up from the south by wind-browned, saddle-weary cowboys who sang endless chanteys to pass the time as they rode with their herds up the long trail.  He saw the cattle humped and drifting before the wind in the first blizzards of winter, while gray wolves slunk watchfully here and there, their shaggy coats ruffled by the biting wind.  He saw them when came the chinook, a howling, warm wind from out the southwest, cutting the snowbanks as with a knife that turned to water what it touched, and laying bare the brown grass beneath.  He saw the riders go out with the wagons to gather the lank-bodied, big-kneed calves and set upon them the searing mark of their owner’s iron.

Urged by the spell of the dried little man’s plaintive monologue, the old range lived again for Luck, out there under the moon, while the train carried him on and on through the night.

What a picture it all would make—­the story of those old days as they had been lived by men now growing old and bent.  With all the cheap, stagy melodrama thrown to one side to make room for the march of that bigger drama, an epic of the range land that would be at once history, poetry, realism!