Throughout the following day various wagons turned aside to the right or left, branching away toward some far spot allotted to them, there to begin the first actual work. In the late afternoon the Half Diamond H wagon made its stand on a creek that flowed to the Cimarron from the low watershed between that stream and the North Fork of the Canadian. The cook’s summons brought the men tumbling from their bed rolls an hour before dawn. The night hawk hazed the _remuda_ into a corral fashioned by a single rope stretched between stakes sledged solidly into the sod, and after breakfasting the men entered in pairs, each to rope a circle horse of his own particular string. In the first light of day Younger led off up a ridge to the main divide flanking the creek to the left and turned upstream along it. Other reps had joined the wagon and there were now nearly twenty riders following where he led. At the head of each draw he detailed one or two men to work it. When half of the crew had been assigned to cover certain stretches Younger dropped again to the bottoms, mounted to the opposite divide and moved downstream in a similar fashion until even with the wagon, working the last draw himself. The riders combed the scrub-oak side hills and the gulches, shoving all stock before them to the bottoms and heading them upstream. The first riders to finish their details were stationed across the valley to halt the cows brought in by others. The chuck wagon had lumbered on up the creek to the point from which the next circle would be thrown. The night hawk had gone off duty with sunrise but the wrangler held the _remuda_ in a rope corral. While a part of the men held the herd the others repaired to this enclosure and caught fresh horses, those who were to engage in the next gathering swing putting their ropes on circle mounts, while those detailed to bring up the day herd caught trained cow horses belonging to their individual strings. In a breeding-ranch country the herd would have been worked on the spot, calves roped and ironed with the brand worn by their mothers, and only the beef steers cut into a day herd, the she-stuff and all stock younger than two-year-olds being allowed to scatter once more on the range. But there were no calves to brand, no she-stock on the range, for of late the cowmen of the Strip had come to follow one set rule in accord with the transition of the cow business, forming an intermediate link between the old-time cattle kings of the open range and the modern feeders of the corn belt. For beef raising, instead of a one-outfit business from start to finish, had come to be a business of progression induced by the necessities of later-day conditions. Big breeding ranches were now mainly confined to the vast wastes of Texas and the Southwest and to similar stretches in the ranges of the Northwest.