“This outfit,” said he, “didn’t half water the herd to-day.  One third of them hasn’t bedded down yet, and they don’t act as if they aim to, either.  There’s no excuse for it in a well-watered country like this.  I’ll leave the saddle on my horse, anyhow.”

“Now that’s the result,” said our foreman, “of the hour we spent around that grave to-day, when we ought to have been tending to our job.  This outfit,” he continued, when Officer returned from picketing his horse, “have been trying to hold funeral services over that Pierce man’s grave back there.  You’d think so, anyway, from the tales they’ve been telling.  I hope you won’t get the sniffles and tell any.”

“This letting yourself get gloomy,” said Officer, “reminds me of a time we once had at the ‘J.H.’ camp in the Cherokee Strip.  It was near Christmas, and the work was all done up.  The boys had blowed in their summer’s wages and were feeling glum all over.  One or two of the boys were lamenting that they hadn’t gone home to see the old folks.  This gloomy feeling kept spreading until they actually wouldn’t speak to each other.  One of them would go out and sit on the wood pile for hours, all by himself, and make a new set of good resolutions.  Another would go out and sit on the ground, on the sunny side of the corrals, and dig holes in the frozen earth with his knife.  They wouldn’t come to meals when the cook called them.

“Now, Miller, the foreman, didn’t have any sympathy for them; in fact he delighted to see them in that condition.  He hadn’t any use for a man who wasn’t dead tough under any condition.  I’ve known him to camp his outfit on alkali water, so the men would get out in the morning, and every rascal beg leave to ride on the outside circle on the morning roundup.

“Well, three days before Christmas, just when things were looking gloomiest, there drifted up from the Cheyenne country one of the old timers.  None of them had seen him in four years, though he had worked on that range before, and with the exception of myself, they all knew him.  He was riding the chuckline all right, but Miller gave him a welcome, as he was the real thing.  He had been working out in the Pan-handle country, New Mexico, and the devil knows where, since he had left that range.  He was meaty with news and scarey stories.  The boys would sit around and listen to him yarn, and now and then a smile would come on their faces.  Miller was delighted with his guest.  He had shown no signs of letting up at eleven o’clock the first night, when he happened to mention where he was the Christmas before.

“‘There was a little woman at the ranch,’ said he, ’wife of the owner, and I was helping her get up dinner, as we had quite a number of folks at the ranch.  She asked me to make the bear sign—­doughnuts, she called them—­and I did, though she had to show me how some little.  Well, fellows, you ought to have seen them—­just sweet enough, browned to a turn, and enough to last a week.  All the folks at dinner that day praised them.  Since then, I’ve had a chance to try my hand several times, and you may not tumble to the diversity of all my accomplishments, but I’m an artist on bear sign.’