Chip saddled Silver, his own particular “drifter,” eyed the clouds appraisingly and swung into the saddle for a fifteen-mile ride to the home ranch and his wife, the Little Doctor.  “You can make it, all right, if yuh half try,” he encouraged.  “It isn’t going to cut loose before dark, if I know the signs.  Better put your jaw in a sling, Happy—­you’re liable to step on it.  Cheer up! to-morrow’s the Day we Celebrate in letters a foot high.  Come early and stay late, and bring your appetites along.  Fare-you-well, my brothers.”  He rode away in the long lope that eats up the miles with an ease astonishing to alien eyes, and the Happy Family rolled a cigarette apiece and went back to work rather more cheerful than they had been.

Pleasure, the pleasure of wearing good clothes, dancing light-footedly to good music and saying nice things that bring smiles to the faces of girls in frilly dresses and with brown, wind-tanned faces and eyes ashine, comes not often to the veterans of the “Sagebrush Cavalry.”  They were wont to count the weeks and the days, and at last the hours until such pleasure should come to them.  They did not grudge the long circles, short sleeps and sweltering hours at the branding, which made such pleasures possible—­only so they were not, at the last, cheated of their reward.

Every man of them—­save Pink—­had secret thoughts of some particular girl.  And more than one girl, no doubt, would be watching, at the picnic, for a certain lot of white hats and sun-browned faces to dodge into sight over a hill, and looking for one face among the group; would be listening for a certain well-known, well-beloved chorus of shouts borne faintly from a distance—­the clear-toned, care-naught whooping that heralded the coming of Jim Whitmore’s Happy Family.

To-morrow they would be simply a crowd of clean-hearted, clean-limbed cowboys, with eyes sunny and untroubled as a child’s, and laughs that were good to hear and whispered words that were sweet to dream over until the next meeting. (If you ask the girls of the range-land, and believe their verdict, cowboys make the very best and most piquant of lovers.) Tomorrow there would be no hint of the long hours in the saddle, or the aching muscles and the tired, smarting eyes.  They might, if pressed, own that they burnt the earth getting there, but the details of that particular conflagration would be far, far behind them—­forgotten; no one could guess, to-morrow, that they were ever hot or thirsty or tired, or worried over a threatening storm, or that they ever swore at one another ill-naturedly from the sheer strain of anxiety and muscle-ache.

By sundown, so great was their industry, the last calf had scampered, blatting resentment, to seek his mother in the herd.  Slim kicked the embers of the branding fire apart and emptied the water-bucket over them with a satisfied grunt.

“By golly, I ain’t mourning because brandin’s about over,” he said.  “I’m plumb tired uh the sight uh them blasted calves.”