He mighn’t be lucky twice in one night. The pitcher that goes often enough to the well---- Rock shrugged his shoulders and shook his horse into a lope. In twenty minutes he drew up to where the Seventy Seven herd lay bedded, a huge dark blot on the bleached grass, with the chuck tent looming a ghost-white outline, half a mile past the sleeping herd. CHAPTER III: THE STEERING WHEEL When the sun flung its Midas touch across the Nebraska plains the morning after what was but an episode in Clark’s Ford, it struck a ruddy sheen on the sorrel horse Rock Holloway bestrode and made the sleek coat of the black pony that carried his bed, shine like a piece of widow’s silk. Rock hummed a little tune as he rode. He had lived through that unavoidable encounter with Mark Duffy. He had avoided open clash with Duffy’s brother by quitting the Seventy Seven. A blood feud is no light thing to be involved in. Rock had no regrets over Mark. The man’s bulldozing disposition had brought them to the verge once or twice on the trail. But Rock had no desire to burn powder against a man who would be actuated chiefly by some vague notion that it was proper to avenge a dead kinsman. Duffy, the trail boss, had been a little stunned by the death of his domineering brother. He had tentatively agreed that Rock was not to blame. He had paid him his wages and let him go unmolested. But later on, Rock knew, the surviving Duffy would ponder and brood, be urged to reprisal, as in the cloak-and-sword period gallants brooded upon a slight to their honor, whether real or fancied, until they had no course but to draw blade. So Rock was well satisfied to be a lone horseman in a waste of grass and sage in the cool of a summer morning. On the flat area running unbroken by mountain or forest, from horizon to horizon, he marked northbound herds in the offing, as a lookout might descry distant sails at sea. Over yonder was a Matador herd, yonder marched the horned regiment of the Turkey Track. At a guess, Rock could have named the brand of the five herds visible within the radius of his sight. Northbound, headed for free grass and abundant water, as the Israelites of old went forth seeking the land of milk and honey. Texas was full of cattle, full to overflowing, and the overflow in that season swept in full volume over twenty-three degrees of latitude to end in Montana, with sundry minor spillings into the Canadian northwest.