“‘How do you get any sport out of them,’ demands the lady, ’if they can’t give you a jolly good chase?’

“That’s what she asked me in so many words.  I says, does she aim to breed racing cattle?  And she says, where will the sport be with creatures all out of condition with fat, like mine are?  It took me about ten minutes to get her idea, it was that heinous or criminal.  When I did get it I sent her to old Safety First; and what does she do but buy a herd of twenty yearling steers from the old crook!  Scrubby little runts that had been raised out in the hills and was all bone and muscle, and any one of ’em able to do a mile in four minutes flat, I guess.

“Old Safety was tickled to death at first when he put off this refuse on her at a price not much more than double what they would have brought in a tanyard, which was all they’d ever be good for except bone fertilizer, mebbe; but he was sick unto death when he found they was just what she wanted, the skinnier the better and he could have got anything he asked for ’em.  He says to me afterward why don’t I train some of mine and trim her good?  But I told him I’m cinched for hell, anyway, and don’t have to make it tighter by torturing poor dumb brutes.

“That’s what it amounted to.  Having got Angora chaps and cowboy hats for herself and offsprings, what do they do but get on ponies and chase this herd all over creation, whirling their ropes, yelling, shooting in the air—­just like you see on any well-conducted ranch.  Once in a while the old lady herself, being a demon rider, would rope an animal and fetch it down; but brother and sister was very careful not to tangle their own ropes on anything.  They didn’t shoot their guns with any proper spirit, either; and when they tried to yip like cowboys they sounded like rabbits.  And brother having to smoke brown-paper cigarettes, which he hated like poison and had trouble in rolling!

“Mother could roll ’em, all right—­do it with one hand.  And she urged sister to; but sister rebelled for once.  The old lady admitted this was due to a fault in her early training.  It seems her grandmother had been one of the old-fashioned sort; and, having studied the modern young woman of society in Boston and New York, she’d promised sister a string of pearls if she didn’t either smoke or drink till her twenty-first birthday.  Sister had not only won the pearls but had come on to twenty-eight without being like other young girls of the day, and wasn’t going to begin now.  So ma and brother had to do all the smoking.

“After a fine morning’s run following the steers they’d like as not have a little branding in the afternoon, the old-fashioned kind that ain’t done in the higher ranch circles any more, where a couple of silly punchers rope an animal fore and aft and throw it, thereby setting it back at least four months in its growth.  The old lady was puzzled again by me having my branding done in a chute, where