Only the creek and the lazy, wide-mouthed coulee and the trailing clouds and the soft wind seemed not to mind.
Came another sunrise and with it the clamor, the voices, the rattle of riding gear, the trampling.

Then a final burst and rattle, a dying of sounds in the distance, a silence as the round-up swept on over the range-land, miles away to the next camping place.

Then the little prairie folk--the gopher, the plump-bodied prairie dogs, the mice and the rabbits, would listen long before they crept timidly out to sniff suspiciously the still-tainted air and inspect curiously and with instinctive aversion the strange marks left on the earth to show that it was all something more than a horrible nightmare.
So, under cloud and sun, when the wind blew soft and when it raved over the shrinking land, when the cold rain drove men into their yellow slickers and set horses to humping backs and turning tail to the drive of it and one heard the cook muttering profanity because the wood was wet and the water ran down the stovepipe and hungry men must wait because the stove would not "draw," the Double-Crank raked the range.

Horses grew lean and ill-fitting saddles worked their wicked will upon backs that shrank to their touch of a morning.

Wild range cattle were herded, a scared bunch of restlessness, during long, hot forenoons, or longer, hotter afternoons, while calves that had known no misfortune beyond a wet back or a searching wind learned, panic-stricken, the agony of capture and rough handling and tight-drawn ropes and, last and worst, the terrible, searing iron.
There were not so many of them--these reluctant, wild-eyed pupils in the school of life.