For a long hour, on that November afternoon, my brother Ted had been standing at the gate below the ranch house, waiting and waiting, while the twilight filled the round hollow of the valley as water slowly fills a cup. At last the figure of a rider, silhouetted against the rose-colored sky, came into view along the crest of the rocky ridge. The little cow pony was loping as swiftly as the rough trail would permit, but to Ted’s impatient eyes it seemed to crawl as slowly as a fly on a window pane. Although the horseman looked like a cow puncher, at that distance, with his slouch hat and big saddle, the eager boy knew that it was the district doctor making his far rounds over the range. A swift epidemic had been sweeping over Montana, passing from one ranch to another and leaving much illness and suffering behind. Ted’s uncle and the cousin who was his own age had both been stricken two days before and it seemed that the doctor would never come. “I’m glad you are here,” he said as the doctor’s pony, covered with foam and quivering with fatigue, passed through the open gate. “We have two patients for you.” The man nodded. “Fever, I suppose,” he commented, “and aching bones, and don’t know what to make of themselves because they have never been sick before? I have seen a hundred such cases in the last few days. It is bad at all the ranches, but the sheep herders, off in their cabins by themselves, are hit particularly hard.” He slipped from the saddle and strode into the house, leaving Ted to take the tired pony around to the stables. It was very dark now and growing cold, but he felt warmed and comforted, somehow, since the doctor had come. He heard running feet behind him and felt a dog’s nose, cold and wet, thrust into his hand. It was Pedro, the giant, six months’ old wolf hound puppy, long legged and shaggy haired, the pride of Ted’s life and the best beloved of all his possessions. The big dog followed his master into the stable and sat down, blinking solemnly in the circle of lantern light, while the boy was caring for the doctor’s horse and bedding it down. Ted’s thoughts were very busy, now with his anxieties about his uncle, now racing out over the range to wonder how those in the stricken ranch houses and lonely cabins might be faring. There was the ranch on Arran Creek—people there were numerous enough to care for each other. It might be worse at Thompson’s Crossing, and, oh how would it be with those shepherds who lived in tiny cottages here and there along the Big Basin, so far from neighbors that often for months they saw no other faces than the woolly vacant ones of their thousands of sheep.