“This yere outfit don’t lather none,” commented the cook to the horse-wrangler, over the smoke of an early morning fire.

“Don’t lather no more than a chunk of wood,” agreed the horse-wrangler.  “That’s the trouble with a picked-up outfit like this.  Catch ‘W-square’ men kowtowing to a ‘XXX’ boss, even if he is only acting foreman.”

Simpson, the origin of whose connection with the “XXX” was rather a sensitive subject with that outfit, had begun to take his duties as a cattle-man with grim seriousness; he was untiring in his labors; he spent long hours in the saddle, he took his turn at night herding, though he was old for this kind of work.  He condemned the sheep-men with foul-mouthed denunciations, scoffed at their range-rights, said the sheep question should be dealt with in the business-like manner in which the Indian question had been settled.  He was an advocate of violence—­in short, a swaggering, bombastic wind-bag.  He talked much of “his outfit” and “his men.”  “What was good enough for them was good enough for him,” he would announce at meal-time, in a snivelling tone, when the food happened to be particularly bad.  He split the temporary outfit, brought together for the purpose of handling the beef-herd, into factions.  He put the “XXX” in worse repute than it already enjoyed—­he was, in fact, the discordant spirit of the expedition.  The men attended to their work sullenly.  Discord was rife.  The one thought they shared in common was that of the wages that would come to them at the end of the drive; of the feverish joy of “blowing in,” in a single night; perchance, of forgetting, in one long, riotous evening, the monotony, the hardship, the lack of comradery that made this particular drive one long to be remembered in the mind of every man who had taken part in it.

Meanwhile the herd trailed its half-mile length to the slaughtering pens day after day, all unconscious of its power.  When the steers had trailed for about a fortnight, the question of finding sufficient water for them began to be a serious one.  The preceding winter had been unusually mild, the snow-fall on the mountains averaging less than in the recollection of the oldest plains-man.  Summer had begun early and waxed hot and dry.  The earth began to wrinkle, and cracked into trenches, like gaping mouths, thirsty for the water that came not.  Such streams as had not dried shrank and crawled among the willows like slimy things, that the herd, thirsty though it was from the long drives, had to be coaxed to drink from.

Discontent grew.  The acting foreman, who was a “XXX” man, and a comparative stranger to that part of the country, refused to consult with the “W-square” men in the outfit, who knew every inch of the ground.  The acting foreman thought the Wetmore men looked down on him, “put on dog”; and, to flaunt his authority, he ordered the herd driven due west instead of skirting to the north by the longer route, where they would have had the advantage of drinking at several creeks before crossing Green River.  Moreover, the acting foreman was drinking hard, and he insisted upon his order in spite of the Wetmore men’s protestations.