In the severest of the winter storms, when the grass of the range had been covered with snow for many days, the cattle breached the fences, and mingling with cattle from other ranches they began to roam over the mesas and valley, a terror to the settlers, and as destructive as the locusts of Egypt. The cowboys could do nothing with them; could not hold them on the open lines, and could not repair the broken fences in the bitter cold and the blinding snow. It was a repetition in miniature of the days when the whole of the Great Plains was an open range, and cattle, shelterless and without food, wandered in the winter storms in pitiable distress, dying by thousands. As it was useless and perilous to try to ride any line, Justin and the other cowboys came home. Justin’s feet and hands were frosted, and he went to Clayton’s, where he remained, to have the benefit of Clayton’s medical skill as well as his companionship. Clayton was so troubled by the sufferings of the cattle that he could talk of little else. From his frost-covered windows weary bands of the starving animals could be seen ploughing through the drifts. In each band the largest and strongest were usually in the lead, breaking a way through the snow; the others followed, moving slowly and weakly, in single file, across the white wastes, their legs raw and bleeding from contact with the cutting snow-crust. Their hair was so filled with fine snow beaten in and compacted that often they resembled snow banks, and they were wild-eyed, and gaunt to emaciation. Now and then a band would turn on its course and move back along the path it had broken, eating the frozen grass which the trampling had uncovered. Nothing in the way of food came amiss. The dry pods and stalks of the milk-weed and the heads of thistles protruding through the snow were hungrily snatched at. Unfenced stacks of wild hay prepared by the farmers and settlers for their own stock, disappeared like snow drifts in the spring sun, unless the owners were vigilant and courageous enough to beat back the desperate foragers. Many wild combats took place between the cattle and the exasperated farmers, and more than one man escaped narrowly the impaling horns of some infuriated steer. It seemed cruel to drive the cattle from the food they so much needed, but the farmers were forced to it. Even Clayton and Justin found it necessary to issue forth, armed with prodding pitchforks, and fight with the famishing cattle for the stack of hay which Clayton had in store for his horse. He had fenced it in, but the cattle breached the fence and he could not repair it perfectly while the storm lasted.