“Be a good sport an’ help me out,” the man appealed. “It won’t be but for four or five days, till we get to the post. I’m short-handed, and these mules is bad medicine. I shore need a man that’s handy with a rope. I’ll give you five dollars a day.” Rock grinned and accepted. The mules were certainly bad medicine, and he _was_ handy with a rope, and a few days more or less didn’t matter. Fort Assiniboine lay eighty miles eastward. Fort Benton hugged the north bank of the Missouri, some sixty miles southwest. But here was a job just begging to be taken in hand. So for five days thereafter he was a mule packer, learning something of the way of men and mules in Uncle Sam’s service. He even had an officer suggest that he would make a likely cavalryman. But Rock had different ideas. He took his twenty-five dollars in the shadow of this military post and set his face westward again. He left in the gray of dawn. The second evening he dropped from the level of the plains, full three hundred feet into the valley of the Marias, where a little stream sang and whispered over a pebbly bed, through flats of rich, loamy soil. Sagebrush grew here, and natural meadows spread there. Willows lined the banks. Groves of poplar studded the flats, thickets of service berry. Great cottonwoods, solitary giants and family groups, cast a pleasant shade from gnarly boughs in full leaf. “Gosh, places like this,” Rock murmured, “fairly shout out loud for a fellow to settle down and make himself a home. No wonder Texas is flocking North.” In the first bottom Rock crossed, he stirred up a few cattle, then a band of horses, several of which bore trimmed manes and tails and marks of the saddle--fine-looking beasts, bigger than the Texas mustang. He couldn’t see the brand. “I wonder if we’re anywhere near the Maltese Cross, Sangre, old boy?” he asked the sorrel horse. “Funny, if we’d stumble in there for the night.” * * * * * He rounded a point masked by thickets of young, green poplar and saw a house with smoke curling blue from the chimney. There was a stable beyond, corrals, a stack of last year’s hay, and the lines of a pole fence running away along the river. It was a typical cow outfit’s headquarters. The house was roomy, of pine logs, L-shaped, with a low porch in front. Rock stopped at the front of the house. He saw no one anywhere. The only sign of life about the place was that wisp of blue, a wavering pennant in the still air.