Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/62

 Load, he advised, and ship to Kansas, where he had range to rent at a reasonable figure.

Tom had been in the mind for this all along, and here he was on his way to gamble with Kansas for the remnant of his herd. He had arranged to pay Withers by the head for the use of his range, settlement to be deferred until the cattle were sold. It was the young adventurer's hope that his bones and hides would become beeves in the course of three or four months.

Mrs. Cowgill woke in the night to hear them unloading the cattle into the whitewashed pens, the high-pitched tremolo of man and steer sounding lonesome as the plaint of creatures which belong by right to wide and distant places wailing in the dark for home. There always was something in that wild cowboy note more of melancholy than jubilation to Mrs. Cowsgill's ear. Like coyotes, she often thought, shivering and howling in hunger of a winter night in bleak places among the snow. Why this thought always came to her with the sound she did not know; only that it was so.

It was evening before Laylander got his herd across the river and spread in the green and abundant valley. The cattle were being held there for their first feed on Kansas grass, by two cowboys who had accompanied Laylander from Texas. They were mounted on horses borrowed from Withers.

Tom's intention was to pay these boys off as soon as they had worked the herd out to the range he was to occupy, and let them go back home or find employment in Kansas, as they might elect. He planned to do his