“We’ll swing around by way of town. I want to stop and say good-by to Trace,” he told her. At the courthouse he dismounted and went up to his partner, who was sitting with the amiable sheriff on the shady side of the jail, their chairs tilted back against the adobe wall. Hilda saw that there was a long, speechless hand-grip; and when Hank was mounted, he wheeled again to answer the other’s “Good luck!” which accompanied the free-hearted, open movement and smile of one who has no complaints to make and to whom a few years in jail comes as one of the fairly plentiful bad jokes of the cattle-country life. A lump rose in her throat as she thought of that man of wind and sun and open plain shut away from it all for four years. Maybe, too, the “poplar man” was offensive; maybe prison would be as terrible to Jacox as it would have been to Pearse Masters. But there had been nobody to hide him and bring him food and lend him a horse. Uncle Hank, wrapped in his own somber reflections, did not see the furtive wiping of tears; and, presently, as by mutual understanding, they put their ponies to a lope and caught up with the outfit. The drive up the trail home was actually begun. The column of cattle, with attendant riders—Hilda being one of these—strung out over a mile long. It looked like a great snake on the face of the open country, a vast snake that, day in day out, in dawn or noon or dusk, moved always northwestward, traveling with rustle and swish of twelve thousand hoofs in the short plains grass, or sending forth a murmur as of a smothered rain-storm when it inched itself over naked places; this continuous undernote punctuated and picked out by the plaintive bleating of calves; the occasional more remonstrant lowing of a steer, the clinking of stirrups or bridle bits, the squeak of saddles, the swift patter of galloping hoofs and the calling back and forth, as the boys rode up and down along the flanks of the herd. They were up in the morning at daybreak, so as to travel as much as possible before the heat of the day. At noon there was a long rest, with dinner, the men lying at ease to smoke afterwards, the cattle scattered out under the fewest herders, grazing. On the trip down they had scouted out and marked the route, noting places where a herd of this size could be watered, and each afternoon there was the eager looking for a curving line of growth that advertised the expected stream, or the clumps of tall cottonwoods about a carefully fenced-in spring or water-hole. There was some rough country to be traversed. They crossed steep-sided arroyos, breaks and gulches, where lariats were attached to the back of the wagon as it plunged down, the ponies “setting back on the rope” to prevent the big vehicle from coming bodily on the mules that pulled it. Once down, the ropes were transferred to wagon-tongue and singletrees, and, with a whoop and a great whip-cracking, snorting ponies and straining mules rushed the bank ahead.