Of course this technically described bad year wasn’t so bad one way, because the sheepmen would sure get a tasty wallop, sheep being mighty informal about dying with the weather below zero and scant feed.  When cattle wasn’t hardly feeling annoyed sheep would lie down and quit intruding on honest cattle raisers for all time.  Just a little attention from a party with a skinning knife was all they needed after that.  And so on, back to Homer Gale, who had gone to Red Gap for two days on a matter of life and death—­and of this the less repeated here the better.

Now our narrow way spread to a valley where the sun’s rays were more widely diffused and the dust less pervasive.  We could see a mile ahead to a vaster cloud of dust.  This floated over a band of Arrowhead cattle being driven in from a range no longer sustaining.  They were being driven by Bolsheviki, so my informant disclosed.

We halted above the road and waited for the dusty creatures to plod by us down to the pleasant lea where feed was still to be had and water was sweet.  Then came the Bolshevik rear guard.  It consisted of Silas Atterbury and four immature grandchildren.

Grandpa Atterbury was ninety-three and doing his first labour since he retired, at eighty-five.  The grandchildren, two male and two female, should have been playing childish games.  And they were Bolsheviki, all because they had refused to bring in this bunch of stock except for the wage customarily paid to trained adults.  Even the youngest, known as Sissy Atterbury, aged eight and looking younger, despite her gray coating of powdered alkali, had tenaciously held out for a grown man’s pay, which made her something even worse than a Bolshevik; it made her an I.W.W.

But, as Ma Pettengill said, what could a lady do when Fate had a stranglehold on her.  There was, indeed, nothing to do but tell Sissy to tell one of her incendiary brothers to get up close to grandpa, and yell good and loud at him, and make him understand he was to get a count on that bunch at the first gate, because it didn’t look to us that there was over three hundred head where there ought to be at least five hundred.

And then there was nothing to do but ride ahead of the toiling beasts and again down the narrow way that would bring us to the lowlands of the Arrowhead, where the dust no longer choked and one could see green and smell water.  From the last mesa we looked out over the Arrowhead’s flat fields, six thousand acres under fence, with the ranch house and outbuildings hazy in the distance.

It was a pleasant prospect and warmed Ma Pettengill from her mood of chill negation.  She remarked upon the goodliness of the scene, quite as if the present were not a technical year for cattle raisers.  Then, as we jogged the six miles home by peaceful thoroughfares, the lady, being questioned persistently and suitably, spoke with utter freedom of Homer Gale, who had shamefully deserted his job for two days at the busiest end of the season, when a white man wouldn’t of thought of leaving, even on a matter of life and death.