Elbert was let down and made his way to a group of low buildings in the distance. At the farrier’s shop, he inquired for the foreman, and was told to look for a door ahead, marked ‘Office.’ ‘You’ll find Frost-face in there or somewhere about,’ the blacksmith said. Elbert’s pulse picked up a little at the name of the foreman, but it was certainly a business office he entered. ‘We’re not short-handed,’ snapped the little gray man, with worried face. ‘Things dull down in winter. Nothin’ much to do right now but keep off the hoof-and-mouth disease.’ Outside there was a succession of sick blasts from a truck--the sound of an engine, not only decrepit, but dirty and dry. Elbert turned to the door. ‘Wait a minute, young fellow. We might use a man on the chuck wagon--I wonder if you could drive old Fortitude?’ ‘A mule?’ said Elbert. ‘I’m sure I could learn--’ ‘Mule, hell, motor truck--can’t you hear her?’ ‘I’m afraid I can,’ Elbert said wearily. His father had been right. One distinct value about Heaslep and Company, however--no women in the establishment. Even the cooking staff was Chinese. But the rest was hard to bear. Efficiency and trade had settled down as unromantically as upon a tannery. Heaslep’s was a stock farm, a beef factory, anything but the cattle ranch of dreams. This part of Arizona was sunk in no foam of Indian red. The vast range lay on a squat mesa, partly penciled over with irrigation ditches. Elbert’s tardy soul, longing for the thunder of a stampede, sickened at the sight of thousands of domesticated moos, rack-fed in winter, market-fattened from fenced alfalfa fields, branded in chutes and railroaded as scientifically as tinned biscuit. The only longhorns hung over the mantelpiece in the dormitory of the cowhands. Even the imported bulls were businesslike. Most of the ranges were deserted by this time, the cold weather settling down. Elbert had been taken on as ‘Bert’ Sartwell, but his first letters from home gave the real thing away. All hands relished the discovery. Over a dozen of the men were in for his first Sunday, the day they started him in filling up gopher holes in the environment of the main buildings. Elbert was told that the best way was to soak old newspapers into a pulp and poke them down into the holes with a stick; necessary business every week or ten days during the gopher season. This was the height of it, he was informed. ‘You see, the paper hardens down,’ Cal Monroid said. ‘And gets fire-proof,’ added Slim Gannon, his side-kick.