Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/290



OR a time the gulf between them was bridged.

Toward the end of September it rained again, but too late to save the range. One day the sun was warm and bright, the next small grayish clouds began to gather around the horizon to the Northwest, and slowly to coalesce. Fitful gusts of wind set the dried vegetation on the plains to rattling, and Tom, coming home that night, said:

"Looks like something doing around Medicine Hat!"

The next morning Kay rose to a world clothed in a gray veil. The clouds covered the mountains and hung so low that she felt she could almost touch them, and from this irregular roof came the rain, steady, penetrating and cold. The roads became impassable. Tom, freighting cottonseed cake from Judson, was marooned on the way, and leaving his wagon there, rode the team back.

All over the vast empty country the round-up outfits were at work. Cattlemen were frantically shipping all the cattle they could not hope to hold over the winter. The Potter company, out of twenty-two thousand head, was shipping ten thousand. Kay watched one evening while a dozen cowboys bedded down a herd on a hilltop not far from the house. Until late she could see the red glow from the stove in the cook tent, and at intervals during the night she heard the night guards moving about. When she wakened in the morning they were already on the move.

The days had begun to shorten. At five o'clock twilight fell, and by six she lighted the lamps. Perhaps she never knew just what the lighted windows of the ranch house meant to Tom; he had always been inarticulate in his love for her. But when, after the long day, he rode over some nearby hill and looked down, those warm yellow rectangles of light were his first welcome. His heart swelled, great