The riders ate. A couple volunteered to help the cook wash up. The rest withdrew. They sat about the bed wagon, in the bed tent, sprawled on the earth, swapping yarns. They had no cares. Without capital or herds they worked on terms of perfect equality for those who had both in abundance. Their life called for courage, resource, initiative, endurance at divers times and in strange places. Cold, rain, sleet, driving snow, burning sun and buffeting winds, night watches on sleeping herds, rivers in flood, wild horses, lip-cracking thirst allayed by alkali water, days when they rode from sun to sun and slept with their boots on wherever they could lie down--it was all one. They took it as it came. Untrammeled space, action swift and purposeful toward a clearly seen end, work that was always tinged with the excitement of the unexpected, barred monotony from the range. Saving injury, the mishaps incident to what often was necessarily wild riding, the cow-puncher worked or sought diversion in uniformly high spirits. If he had no clear sense of being a unit in Homeric episodes enacted against a spacious and colorful background, he had a rude dignity of his own as well as a sense of humor which frequently took a Rabelaisian twist, so that his phraseology often needed expurgating before it would pass current in polite society. The tales circulating and the cross-fire of talk among the Block S riders needs no repeating, since it had no more to do with Robin Tyler than to make him chuckle now and then as he lay on his unrolled bed. He had at once noted Mark Steele’s absence. Later some one remarked that Shining was due to eat a cold supper. Then in the dusk Mark Steele and Tommy Thatcher, a lean Texan, noted for his uncanny skill with a rope, rode in and unsaddled. The cook fed them. Mark remained in the chuck-tent, where, with the privilege of the wagon boss, he slept in comparative privacy. Tommy joined his fellows. “Well, we hit her for Big Sandy in the morning,” he announced. “Heigh-ho,” one stretched his arms wide. “Me for the high pillow then. Once we hit Lonesome Prairie us and bed’ll be strangers.” Which was an oblique way of anticipating days in the saddle and nights on guard while the Block S combed the range for marketable beeves. In twenty minutes silence fell on the camp. The men were in their blankets. The nighthawk relieved the day wrangler and moved his horse herd away from about the tents. A moon swam up and Shadow Butte cast a long black cone toward the northwest. Bells tinkled with distant sweetness where the ponies grazed. Midnight passed. When the few hours of darkness began to wane a lantern broke out yellow in the cook tent. As the first paleness showed in the east the cook lifted his call. In less than an hour, with the sun heaving up above the sky line the outfit was under way, all their equipment, tents, cooking layout, beds, extra ropes and gear piled high and lashed on two wagons drawn by four-horse teams.