“Yes, Charleton.  Everybody’s reported but you.”

“I’ll be there.  Start from your place, as usual?”

John nodded, and the rest of the evening was given over to a discussion of details of the round-up.

The fall round-up was always a long and arduous affair.  The cattle were scattered all through the ranges covered by the Forest Reserve.  Slowly and with infinite labor and skill, they were sought out and herded down into Hidden Gorge Canyon, below Fire Mesa.  Thence, they were driven to the plains east of the post-office, where the riders cut out their own cattle.

The weather held for two weeks, star-brilliant at night, with the low of mother-cows separated from their calves from mountain to mountain, with the crisp wind bringing down the frosted leaves of the aspens, and at noon the hot dust swirling up from the horses’ hoofs into the sweating faces of the riders.

Perhaps thirty men rode in the Lost Chief crowd.  The work was more or less solitary by day, but at night over the camp-fires, there was society enough.  Douglas enjoyed it all to the very tips of his being.  He was coming now into the great strength that belonged to his height and could do his full share of the heavy work.  He had thought that, rolled in his blankets, under the stars, he would find inspiration that would help him solve the problem of life.  But long before the camp-fire was low, he would drop into slumber that ended only when his father shook him at dawn.

When the round-up reached the plains, the women set up a camp kitchen and served hot meals.  The weather this year held clear to the last day, when a blizzard swept down from Dead Line Peak and the last of the cutting out was finished in blinding snow.  Douglas and John, after putting the last of their yearlings into the cut over fields, staggered into the warm ranch kitchen half-perished with the cold.

CHAPTER X

WILD HORSES

“If I could believe in God and a heaven I’d ask nothing more of life except a good-saddle-horse.”

_—­Charleton’s Wife_.

And so another long winter was upon Lost Chief.  It was much like other winters for Douglas except for the fact that he began systematically to trap for pelts.  It was a heavy winter and game was plentiful, with pelts of exceptionally fine quality for which there was a good market in St. Louis.  Douglas worked hard and began the accumulation of a sum of money which he planned to use eventually to start his own ranch on the old Douglas section, which was to be his when he came of age.

But although to the young rider the money earned seemed the main aspect of the winter’s work, the important result really lay in the deepening it gave to his appreciation of the beauty and mystery of this mountain valley.