smoke-grimed and painted with symbols, some of them, huddled upon a knoll
out there near the timber line. He heard the tom-toms and he saw the
rhythmic leaping and treading, the posing and gesturing of the braves who
danced in the firelight the tribal Buffalo Dance.

After that he saw the coming of the cattle, driven up from the south by
wind-browned, saddle-weary cowboys who sang endless chanteys to pass the
time as they rode with their herds up the long trail. He saw the cattle
humped and drifting before the wind in the first blizzards of winter,
while gray wolves slunk watchfully here and there, their shaggy coats
ruffled by the biting wind. He saw them when came the chinook, a howling,
warm wind from out the southwest, cutting the snowbanks as with a knife
that turned to water what it touched, and laying bare the brown grass
beneath. He saw the riders go out with the wagons to gather the
lank-bodied, big-kneed calves and set upon them the searing mark of their
owner's iron.

Urged by the spell of the dried little man's plaintive monologue, the old
range lived again for Luck, out there under the moon, while the train
carried him on and on through the night.

What a picture it all would make--the story of those old days as they
had been lived by men now growing old and bent. With all the cheap,
stagy melodrama thrown to one side to make room for the march of that
bigger drama, an epic of the range land that would be at once history,
poetry, realism!

Luck's cigar went out while he sat there and wove scene after scene of
that story which should breathe of the real range land as it once had
been. It could be done--that picture. Months it would take in the making,