By permission The Cosmopolitan Magazine
Dark. Well, it was dark, and no mistake. We had been holding a big herd of steers for a week. It was on the Turkey Track ranch, and they were mostly Turkey Track steers, that is, they were branded with the Santa Maria Cattle Company's brand, which is a design (
) on each side, called Turkey Track by the cowboys, who never think of using any other means of identifying a cow than by giving the name of the brand she carries.
And en passant when a cowboy says "cow," he uses the word as a generic term for everything from a sucking calf up to a ten-year-old bull.
We were in camp in a noble valley some fifteen miles long by ten wide, dotted here and there by cedar groves, and at that season covered with splendid grass, where we were holding a bunch of steers that the company was getting ready to ship; it was a lazy enough life except the night-work. There was plenty of grass to graze them on in the daytime, and a big "dry lake" full of water, where three thousand head could drink at once, and never one bog or give any trouble. Two men on "day herd" at a time could handle them easily enough, and as there were nine of us, or enough for three guards of three men each, we didn't have anything much to complain of.
"Old Dad," the cook, built pies and puddings that were never excelled anywhere, and occasionally he'd have a plum duff for supper that simply exhausted the culinary art.
The steers were, as the boys say, "a rolicky lot of oxen." Most every night they would take a little run, and it usually took all hands an hour or so to get them back to the bed ground and quieted down, which didn't tend to make us any better natured when the cook yelled, "Roll out, roll out," about 4:30 every morning.