For the time Dug's beaming eyes were shadowed with a concern that was half angry and wholly depressed. They searched the rolling grass-land until the distance was swallowed up by the barrier of hills. He was seeking one reassuring glimpse of the black, hornless herd whose pastures these were. But only disappointment met him on every side. The beautiful, sleek, Aberdeen-Angus herd, which was his joy and pride, had vanished. They had gone, he knew. They had gone the same way that, during the last five years, hundreds of head of his stock had gone. It was the last straw. "Say, Lew Hank," he said, in a voice of something approaching an emotion he possessed no other means of displaying, "it's beat me bad. It's beat me so bad I don't seem able to think right. We'd a hundred head running on this station. As fine a bunch as ever were bred from the old country's strain. I just feel that mad I could set right in to break things." Then, after a long pause during which the station foreman waited silent: "And only last night, while these guys was raising the mischief right here, I was setting around doping out big talk, and raising a mighty big wad for the round-up of the whole darnation gang. Can you beat it? I'm sore. Sore as hell. Say, tell it me again. I don't seem to have it clear." He passed one great muscular hand across his moist forehead, and the gesture was rather one of helplessness. Lew Hank regarded him with measuring eyes. He knew him so well. In the ten years and more he had worked for him he had studied his every mood. This phase in the great cattleman's character was something new, something rather startling. Dug's way was usually volcanic. It was hot and fierce for a while, generally to hollowed by a hearty laugh, rather like the passing of a summer storm. But this, in Lew's opinion, was a display of weakness. A sign he neither liked nor respected. The truth was Dug McFarlane had been hit in a direction of which his subordinate had no understanding. That herd of Aberdeen-Angus cattle had been his plaything. His hobby. He had been devoted to it in a way that would have been absurd to any one but a cattleman. Hank decided this unaccustomed weakness must be nipped in the bud.