But he had only himself to blame.

He should not have taken the risk, even though he had believed that the cattle would not arrive for another half hour.

He should have been ready; he had told the boys to send them right over the ridge when they came up to it, because he wanted to preserve unbroken that indescribable atmosphere of a long, weary journey.
Still they came; a good twenty-five hundred, he was ready to wager, when the last few stragglers, so weak that they wobbled when they hesitated before descending a particularly steep place, came down the slope.

It surely did eat up film to take the full magnitude of that march, but Luck turned and turned and gloated in the bigness of it all.
"All right, Annie," he called out when he had taken the last of the herd as they filed out of sight into the narrow gully that would lead them to the flat half a mile below, where he meant to get other scenes.

"Wave flag now for boys to come!" Annie-Many-Ponies lifted high the black flag and waved it in slow, sweeping half circles above her head.