Three days out from Clark’s Ford he sighted the mass of a trail herd and caught up with it at sundown. Four riders were bunching the cattle on the bed ground. Rock exchanged greetings with one, noted the brand, a Maltese Cross, and went on to the chuck wagon, camped by a nameless creek, meandering out of an endless sweep of plains to the westward into an equally limitless void on the east. The Maltese Cross made him welcome. It was a rare thing for a lone man to come out of those empty spaces. But the range properly held that a man’s business was his own until he chose to divulge it. The Cross herd was bound for northern Montana, they told him. Rock knew that already. The trail boss casually remarked that he was welcome to keep them company if he liked.
Since they had a full crew, Rock didn’t care to be a guest and crawl North at the mad speed of ten miles a day, when he could make thirty or forty a day on his own. So he accepted a hunk of beef from the cook next morning and rode on.
Two weeks brought him into Wyoming, into a different type of country. The flat, undulating surface of the great plains became sharply rolling ridges. He crossed creeks lined with willows and clumps of quaking aspen. He rode through open forests of pine. He made lonely camps in spots of rare beauty. Once or twice he stopped overnight at ranches well established.
Off to the northwest, mountains began to loom. He bore on until these white and purple peaks were behind him on the left, and so came to a watershed dipping in a long slant to the north. By which he guessed that he was well within the Territory of Montana, following a stream that flowed to the Yellowstone.
When he came to that turbulent river, in a valley traversed by the first transcontinental railway to cross the Northwest, he found eight men with a mixed herd at a fording place. They were a weary lot. Eight men to twelve hundred cattle was a short trail crew. They had left Kansas early that spring, they told Rock. They had made fast time, and their horses bore the trace, being gaunt and leg weary, although the cattle were in fair flesh. And the men were even more tired than their stock. Of the scores of trailed herds Rock had passed, this was the first that was short-handed. A trail outfit left the South with a full crew. Barring accident or death, the riders stayed with the herd to the journey’s end. It was equivalent to desertion in the face of the enemy for a trail hand to quit for a whim. In all that bovine pilgrimage, there was no place where riders could be secured, no more than a ship can replace its crew a thousand miles offshore.
“I can use you plenty,” the trail boss said, as soon as he sized Rock up, “if you hanker to be usefully employed.”
“Where you bound for?” Rock asked.
“Canada. Old Man River in the Fort MacLeod country,” the man said.
“In the home of the mounted police, eh?” Rock drawled. “We go through the Blackfeet country. That’s about as far North as cattle range, isn’t it?”