living luxuriously at the club houses in the various towns and trusting the real management of the herds and ranches to subordinates, sometimes with, but more frequently without, practical experience. This was all very well while the markets ruled high and a thousand-pound steer brought, at the Chicago Stock Yards, sixty to seventy dollars. If expenses piled up and the output of ripe steers in the autumn was likely to prove inadequate for the meeting of current expenses and the declaring of the usual annual dividend on the stock, a bunch of two-year-old steers and the culls from the threes and fours, unfit for beef, were rounded up, shipped and sold as feeders, the proceeds going to swell the regular profits on the business and cheer the heart of the stockholder. This robbery of the herd was all right from the manager’s standpoint so long as it tickled the avarice of the Eastern or foreign shareholders and prevented a careful investigation of the methods employed. But it was wholesale robbery just the same, and sooner or later must be discovered and charged up to those responsible therefor. Meantime the country was virtually overrun with cattle, the ranges crowded and the grass eaten until the winter food was too short to carry the stock through the cold weather. The range cattle industry is based on the theory and fact that the grasses of the so-called arid region grow up in the spring, quickly ripen and cure in the sun, retaining all of the sugar, starch, gluten, etc., in a more or less crystallized state, thus affording a really rich winter diet for all kinds of herbivorous animals. So long as the requisite proportion of the growth was allowed to mature and properly cure, the cattle thrived in winter nearly as well as in summer--at least they remained strong and healthy during the stormy weather and quickly laid on flesh when the green grass came. With the range overcrowded the grass was largely consumed in summer and very little was left to grow tall and carry rich seeds for winter feeding. The winter range should not be grazed in summer. This shortage of feed, coupled with a few exceptionally hard winters, caused an excessive mortality among all classes of cattle and reduced the calf crop fully one-half in all the mixed or breeding herds. Very soon this commenced to tell in the output of beef steers and greatly reduced the income of the company, so that more robbery of the herd had to be resorted to in order to pay a dividend and keep up the market price of the stock shares. Then came a sudden and marked decline in beef values at the great market centers. The steers that had brought anywhere from fifty to seventy dollars at Chicago, now sold for from twenty-five to fifty, a shrinkage of nearly one-half as a rule. This decline was due, first, to the real falling off in beef values, and second, to the generally poor condition of the range shipments in consequence of overstocking and the resulting scarcity of feed.