CHAPTER II


The rancher had ridden into the Canadian plains country from below "the
line" long before barbed wire had become a menace in cattle-land. From
Pincher Creek to Maple Creek, and far beyond, the plains lay unbroken
save by the deep canyons where, through the process of ages, mountain
streams had worn their beds down to gravel bottoms, and by the
occasional trail which wandered through the wilderness like some
thousand-mile lariat carelessly dropped from the hand of the Master
Plainsman. Here and there, where the cutbanks of the river Canyons
widened out into sloping valleys, affording possible access to the
deep-lying streams, some ranchman had established his headquarters, and
his red-roofed, whitewashed buildings flashed back the hot rays which
fell from an opalescent heaven. At some of the more important fords
trading posts had come into being, whither the ranchmen journeyed twice
a year for groceries, clothing, kerosene, and other liquids handled as
surreptitiously as the vigilance of the Mounted Police might suggest.
The virgin prairie, with her strange, subtle facility for entangling the
hearts of men, lay undefiled by the mercenary plowshare; unprostituted
by the commercialism of the days that were to be.

Into such a country Y.D. had ridden from the South, trailing his little
bunch of scrub heifers, in search of grass and water and, it may be, of
a new environment. Up through the Milk River country; across the Belly
and the Old Man; up and down the valley of the Little Bow, and across
the plains as far as the Big Bow he rode in search of the essentials of
a ranch headquarters. The first of these is water, the second grass,