Page:BM Bower - Her Prairie Knight.djvu/247

 May Day found the grass-land brown and lifeless, with a chill wind blowing over it. The cattle wandered as before—except that knock-kneed little calves trailed beside their lean mothers and clamored for full stomachs.

The Cross L cattle bore the brunt of the range famine, because Eagle Creek Smith was a stockman of the old school. His cattle must live on the open range, because they always had done so. Other men bought or leased large tracts of grass-land, and fenced them for just such an emergency, but not he. It is true that he had two or three large fields, as Miss Conroy had told Rowdy, but it was his boast that all the hay he raised was eaten by his saddle-horses, and that all the fields he owned were used solely for horse pastures. The open range was the place for cattle—and no Cross L critter ever fed inside a wire fence.

Through the dry summer before, when other men read the ominous signs and hurriedly leased pasture-land and cut down their herds to what the fields would feed, Eagle Creek went calmly on as he had done always. He shipped what beef was fit—and that, of a truth, was not much!—and settled down for the winter, trusting to winter snows and 241