'Well, no, not quite that, Dick, you old sinner. How are the boys?' replied Nares to a grey-headed old man, who was sitting complacently on the driver's seat of a cart, and watching 'the boss' put his own luggage on board. There are no porters and no servants, even for a big cattle-man, out west. 'How air the boys, you said. Well, right smart and active at meal-times, thank ye, and pretty slack at any other. But what's that, anyway, that you're bringing along?' and the old man's eyes rested with a look of no little disgust on the English-dressed and (to Western eyes) soft-looking lad, Snap Hales. 'That!' replied the boss, 'that is just--well, let me see, a colt I want you to break; a child I want you to nurse, Dick,' replied Nares. 'Nuss? I'll nuss him,' growled the old man. 'We don't want no loafers up at Rosebud.' Poor Snap coloured up to his eyes, but felt more comfortable as Nares gave him a wink and a hand-up into the cart. 'Now then, air you fixed behind?' cried Dick. 'We are,' replied Nares. 'Then git,' yelled his foreman, bringing his whip across his horses' flanks, and for the next five minutes Snap and Nares, and the boxes, bags, &c., of each of them, bounded about like parched peas in a pan. As the old man gradually steadied his horses to a trot, he turned round with a grin. 'That's pretty well sorted you, I reckon,' said he, 'and may be took the first coat off your tender-foot's hide.' Luckily for the tender-foot (our friend Snap), it is one of the laws of nature that, given a lot of objects of various weights shaken up together, the lightest invariably comes to the top. During the last five minutes he had varied his seat frequently from the uncompromising corner of a trunk to the yielding and comfortable person of the burly Nares, from whose waistcoat (being of a pliant and springy character) the next bump would have removed him to a seat upon the prairie. Luckily, that bump never came. Mile after mile of prairie rolled by, yellow where the snow (very thin hereabouts) left it uncovered, and apparently too sterile to feed a goat. Further on it improved, and great tufts of golden bunch grass showed through the thin sprinkling of snow, and here and there a sage-hen fluttered up or a jack rabbit scuttled away. About noon our friends crossed a river, on the further side of which were the feeding-lands of Nares's ranche. Some miles again from the river was a range of low rolling hills and broken lands, the shelter provided by Nature for the beasts of the field against blizzards and snowstorms. Nares used to boast his ranche had every advantage obtainable in America--plenty of water, river-lands to cut hay upon for winter feed, hills and broken land for shelter in storm-time, and a railway handy to take produce to market. There are very few such ranches nowadays in America, as even its great prairies are not boundless--a fact much overlooked by its go-ahead citizens.