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"Well, perhaps we'd better be moving. We have a long ride yet." Their way led by devious cattle trails along the coulées, over ridges, into other coulées. Clyde lost all idea of direction, but her companion was never at a loss, and finally they emerged upon a broad, well-travelled trail.
The country was new and open, and when the stock could drift freely in advance of storms, their instincts carried them to the sheltering coulees, cut banks, and broken country until the blizzard had passed. Since our firm began maturing beeves ten years before, the losses attributable to winter were never noticed, nor did they in the least affect our profits.
None among them saw those cruel, spying eyes watching from distant ridges, peering at them from concealed ravines; none marked the rapidly massing hordes, hideous in war-paint, crowded into near-by coulées and behind protecting hills. It burst upon them with wild yells.
Miss Whitmore sighed and took to studying the landscape, which had become a succession of sharp ridges and narrow coulees, water-worn and bleak, with a purplish line of mountains off to the left. After several miles she spoke. "What is that animal over there? Do dogs wander over this wilderness alone?" Chip's eyes followed her pointing finger. "That's a coyote.
But already every chance for successful attack had vanished; the whole narrow valley seemed to swarm with braves; they poured forth from sheltering coulées and shadowed ravines; they dashed down in countless numbers from the distant village. Custer, now far away behind the bluffs, and almost beyond sound of the firing, was utterly ignored.
Seven thousand lean kine had passed that way before them, eating the scant grass growth and drinking what water they could find among those barren, sun-baked coulees. The Cross L boys, on this third trip, were become a jaded lot of hollow-eyed men, whose nerves were rasped raw with long hours and longer days in the saddle.
Miss Allen started out on the second day and hunted through all the coulees and gulches in the neighborhood of her claim coulees and gulches that had been searched frantically two or three times before. She had no time to make whimsical speeches to Andy Green, nor he to listen. When they met, each asked the other for news, and separated without a thought for each other.
The range-land was at its unpicturesque worst. For two days the wind had raged and ranted over the hilltops, and whooped up the long coulees, so that tears stood in the eyes of the Happy Family when they faced it; impersonal tears blown into being by the very force of the wind.
Lieutenant Calvert, with his invalid corps, was dragging wearily after them, something like two miles away over the rolling surface, sometimes dipping out of sight among the swales and coulées, sometimes crawling over some low wave, and Davies, restored to consciousness and accompanied by one of Devers's oldest troopers, Sergeant McGrath, had once more ridden away to join his distant and isolated party.
Here and there the valleys were cut through by coulees through which ran swift, blue-gray rivers, clear and icy cold, while from the hilltops we caught glimpses of little lakes covered with wild-fowl that shrieked and squawked and splashed, careless of danger. Now and then we saw what made a black spot against the green of the prairie, and Jack told me it was a rancher's shack.
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