"Just tell him I am all right and having a good time. You might tell him, too, what happened over at Powell's. And, of course, if there's any mail for me, bring it back with you. I don't expect to hear anything from that man I bought the saddle from. Maybe, instead of leaving the saddle at Brown's, he just took it with him on the train; but if he did, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he sent me back my five dollars." "Well," said Hugh, "it will be all guessing for a while yet; but I'll bring any mail there is." "So long," called Rube; and Jack turned and rode back toward the camp. The distance that had seemed so very long when driving the herd, now seemed surprisingly short, for he rode fast. He did not ride back to the old camp because they were going to move that morning, and when he rode down out of the hills he could see, a couple of miles away on the prairie, the two wagons and the cávaya crawling along over the sage-brush flat toward the next camp, which was to be on Box Elder Creek. When he overtook the wagons, Frank, the cook, who was driving the chuck wagon, told him that McIntyre had left word that Jack should start out and make a short circle to the eastward, taking in the low hills on the edge of the basin, but not going far back, and should turn anything that he found down into the flat country, where it could be readily gathered the next day. Jack accordingly rode on to the cávaya, roped a fresh horse, and turned loose Pawnee, and then rode back to the cook's wagon, where he begged from Frank a chunk of bread and some bacon. Having disposed of that, he rode off toward the low hills to the east. When he had gone a short distance into the hills he saw fresh tracks of horses and of cattle running, and from this he concluded that riders had passed over this ground the day before and gathered what cattle had been feeding there; and presently, coming across a trail of a good many head, with horse tracks following the trail and on top of the cow tracks, he made sure that his conclusion was right. After riding a mile or two farther, however, he came across a little bunch of cattle feeding on the steep hillsides of a ravine, and going around them he pushed them down the hill and in the direction in which he was riding. The cattle were not wild, and it would have been easy to drive them in any direction; but of course they went slowly, and if Jack simply drove them into the round-up camp he could not cover much country; on the other hand, if he drove them down into the valley he knew that at this time of the day they would at once turn about and return to the hills where there was water and, in the ravines, the green grass that the cattle like.