He came among us, pink and white and fearfully clean; and he was the owner’s son. There were eleven thousand cows in our domain, but milk had been a thing of rumor to the outfit, perhaps because it is inconvenient to milk on horseback. Now, however, Vance shoved his legs under the boards at the bunk-house and objected to clear, biting coffee. So, when he departed blacker than a Mexican, with a two months’ beard and overalls sustained by a strand of rope,--babbling wild things of a bath he would take, a bath that would endure for a day and a night,--we still had Molly. “That cow’s got a mind, I tell you,” Uncle Henry assured the outfit at supper. “She’s got a mind jist like you or me, Dave, only better than yourn. Pass them frijoles.” Perhaps Molly did have a mind. At any rate, she was humanly lonesome. To be the only one of her kind in a tract of five thousand acres--they kept her in the horse pasture--was depressing to a companionable disposition. The bronchos on the river flats and mesquite-clothed hills were shy, wild creatures, subject to alarms and foolish panic. With mild wonder she would watch them break into a run at a sound or a strange scent. They were masterful, too, always driving her away from the water-holes and the salt until they had had their fill. Instinctively she was afraid when one of them approached with careless confidence that she would give place. Yet, though unhappy, Molly never overlooked her duty, and each morning and each evening she stood quiet while Uncle Henry milked her, occasionally rumbling a note of satisfaction or sweeping at a fly with cautious backward swings of her head. Uncle Henry was becoming too stiff for hard riding, and now spent most of his time trying to persuade himself and others that the odd jobs he applied himself to were of his own choosing. One morning Molly awoke to turmoil. Wondrous noises came to her on the west wind, and she arose and walked to the imprisoning fence. Truly the Tumbling K was become a Babel. In the wide, browned valleys, on the mesas, and far into the fastnesses of the Mules, bulls and cows and clumsy calves were on the march, with riders hanging in rear. Molly could hear the churning of the hosts on the round-up ground, and to her nostrils was wafted the taint of the dust belching heavenward in clouds. For the Tumbling K range was to be divided, and eight thousand head must be turned over to the retiring partner. Where did all the cattle come from? Molly had never dreamed there were such hordes of her kind in the world. Armies of them filed by in long lines, the cowboys on flank and in rear shouting, whistling, spurring into the press in their efforts to urge the herds forward. Molly stood at the barb-wire fence most of the day, staring at this rally of her species. Sometimes she bawled a troubled greeting.