Jonas Hicks's past had been somewhat variegated and thus all of a piece. Some years before the present moment, when the railroad was younger and the "garden spot of the world" was just beginning to attract attention to its future, Jonas carelessly acquired a patch of forty acres near the new town of Thornton. At that time he was still "on the drive," a vocation which took him with the big herds anywhere from Texas to Fort Benton in Montana. In the calling of cowboy he had, by a process of natural selection, risen and gradually settled into the character of cook. Risen, we say, because, in a cattle outfit, there is not a more important and unquestioned personage; his word is law and they call him pet names. However, from the day he got down out of the saddle, in an emergency, and consented to act in the capacity of "Ma,"--which was a joke,--he was in continual demand as cook, with increasing popularity. Though he still claimed the ability to ride and rope and hog-tie with the best of them, he was thenceforth a cook with all the cook's perquisites and autocratic say-so. There is nowhere, we might observe, so deep an indication of the true power of Woman as this respect that is paid to her position, even when it is being occupied by a red-faced being who wears whiskers and who has no real right, of his own, to be anything more than an equal of his brother man. But the cook's laws must not be disobeyed; they allow him to make laws because he is cook; masculine sentiment is on his side; human welfare demands it. As Jonas was popular in the position, and did not mind the work when it was appreciated, he continued to fry bacon and fringy flapjacks and, in general, to furnish "the grease of life," as he called it, to the outfit. And while he was doing it his fellows conducted the beef, on ten thousand legs, from the South to the North. They took them North so that they would put on fat under the stimulus of a Northern winter.