Sutherland had come into Montana with a beef herd for a military post. He had remained to grow up with the country. He had become big financially. He had been a big man physically. Now that he was no longer young his flesh was becoming a burden. He liked to jog around the home ranch on Little Eagle in the summer, to ride out and watch his men handle stock when the round-up worked near home. He liked to be in Big Sandy when his beef herds were marshaled into the stockyards in a cloud of dust and see the fat steers go rolling east in trainloads. He liked to see his riders have their fling in town. His rule over all that lay under his ægis was beneficent, almost paternal. Adam Sutherland had never heard of such a thing as an efficiency system, but he had its equivalent at his service, functioning smoothly, ungrudgingly. A vision of the future was a phrase he might not have fully comprehended, but he had that too, or he would not have owned thousands of acres of meadow land, the headwaters of mountain streams, a score of unfenced pastures in a country where grass and water were as yet free to all men, in a period when most cattlemen still believed that the great plains must remain a cow pasture for all time to come. The Sutherland holdings dotted the foothills of the Bear Paws in a semicircle fifty miles south and east. He sat on the counter in the big store now, and greeted his riders as they passed in and out making sundry small purchases. Later in the evening he made the round of the saloons and hotel bar, the Silver Dollar, Monty’s Place, the Exchange, bought a round of drinks for “the house” in each place. Then he went away to his house set off on a knoll to one side of the town, a white, sprawling cottage with a green patch of lawn about it, surrounded by a picket fence to keep out the wandering stock that sometimes strayed wide-eyed into the single street of this frontier hamlet. The fence served also the secondary purpose of keeping out over-hilarious cow-punchers who might mistake the place for something else and in high spirits--both literally and figuratively--undertake to ride their horses up the front steps and along the porch, crying a jovial challenge to those within to come out and “whoop ’er up.” Mark Steele’s outfit went north into the flat waste of Lonesome Prairie next morning. The Block S cowboys struck town again in something less than three weeks. They had sent a trainload of cattle east from Galata on the high line of the Great Northern. Now they drew up to Big Sandy with a herd seventeen hundred strong, sleek, fat, long-horned beasts moving like an army without banners but armed with spears that glinted in the sun, the slender wide-curving horns inherited from bulls of Andulasian blood.