up with the open expectation of using the truck upon which Luck was
sitting uncomfortably. There was the squint of long looking against sun
and wind at a far skyline in the dried little man's face. There was a
certain bow in his legs, and there were various other signs which Luck
read instinctively as he got up. He smiled his smile, and the dried
little man grinned back companionably.

"Say, old-timer, what's gone with all the cattle and all the punchers?"
Luck demanded with a mild querulousness.

The dried little man straightened from the truck handles and regarded
Luck strangely.

"My gorry, son, plumb hazed off'n this section the earth, I reckon.
Farmers and punchers, they don't mix no better'n sheep and cattle. Why, I
mind the time when--"

The train was late, anyway, and the dried little man sat down on the
truck, and fumbled his cigarette book, and began to talk. Luck sat down
beside him and listened, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and
a cold cigarette in his fingers. It was not of this part of the country
that the dried little man talked, but of Montana, over there to the west.
Of northern Montana in the days when it was cowman's paradise; the days
when round-up wagons started out with the grass greening the hilltops,
and swung from the Rockies to the Bear Paws and beyond in the wide arc
that would cover their range; of the days of the Cross L and the Rocking
R and the Lazy Eight,--every one of them brand names to glisten the eyes
of old-time Montanans.

"Where would you go to find them boys now?" the dried little man