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OUISE found time dragging along like an impeding weight. Ranch life in the open places was not all that she had heard of it; the romance of range cattle, and the men who rode after them, drew away as one approached, and stood a dissolving mirage in the distance. She was ready to return to McPacken after a few days of it in Jim Kelly's notable mansion beside the Cherokee Trail.

Cattle raising was merely a business, she found, like any other, with the owner of the herd; cattle grazing a primitive trade to those who threw the ropes and handled the branding-irons. These latter were simple, ordinary men, no more noble, daring nor chivalrous as a class, than the jerries in Orrin Smith's gang. There was a certain careless independence about some of the younger ones, such as flares in youth everywhere and spurs it on to better its condition. Yet in most of them this spirit was not, and never had been.

Taking them as a class, cowhands were depressing associates, their lean vocabularies reduced by the restrictions of polite society when they came to Jim's, to