Chum Lee packed everything he possessed in the world in his capacious bamboo bag, slipping in between the articles of clothing bottles and pipes and boxes filled with redolent odors. He muttered and chattered frantically to himself as he packed, and his hands shook as if with ague. He tied and knotted a stout rope about the bag and, trembling and shivering, put on his old sheepskin coat, muskrat cap and fur mittens. Hoisting the bag upon his back, Chum Lee hastened on panic-winged feet away from the camp at Barstairs.

He had awakened from a long doze, in which he dreamed of summer seas, green as jade, of colorful sampans, alive with moving, friendly faces; of a girl's face, oval and soft, with gentle almond eyes, and a smile like a caress, whose hair was black and smooth as the wing of a teal, and decked with bridal flowers. That fair vision of his home and the young wife he had left in China vanished into the cruel mists of memory. He awoke to intense cold, the bleakness of death itself in the one-room bunkhouse. With a sob, the Chinaman crept out of bed, scurried across the room, only to find the fire was out, then staggered to the woodbox. On his way back to the stove, his arms loaded, he stumbled across something that lay upon the floor in his path. A loud cry escaped the Chinaman. The wood dropped from his shivering arms and clattered down upon the Bar Q "hand." Batt Leeson lay upon his back, where he had rolled out of his bunk overnight. His mouth and eyes were wide open, but did not move or flicker, for Batt was in his last long sleep.

The sight of the dead man, the last of the "boys" to succumb to the "black plague," was too much for the overwrought and drug-weakened Chinaman. Even the terrors of the zero weather were less appalling to face than what was inside that shack. Between his chattering teeth, Chum Lee sent up frantic appeals to the gods of his ancestors to lift the dreaded curse which had befallen the land in which he had sojourned too long.

As he went out of the gate, the long-drawn savage roar of hungry bulls followed him and, turning back upon a sudden resolution, Chum Lee shoved the bars along the sliding doors. He would perform a last act of charity and win the favor of the gods. The famished brutes within would come up presently against the loosened door, and find themselves free from the prison where they had been confined for days.

That day, bellowing and moaning their unceasing demands for feed and water, the bulls crashed against the doors, as the Chinaman had foreseen, and they gave. The animals crossed a barrier of logs, and with heads lifted, they sniffed along the corrals and found the bars which the Chinaman had left down, and strayed out into the lower pasture. The gate stood wide open to the highway, and the vast country stretched beyond, unspeakably desolate under its mantle of deep snow. Out into the world, in search of that which had been denied them in their luxurious and costly sheds, went the famous Hereford bulls.

Pampered and petted, used to being fed almost by hand, and knowing no range save the sweet home pastures, how were they likely to fare in the wilderness? Now the merciless cold of the implacable winter smote them to the bone, and the unbroken expanse of frozen snow rose four feet deep in mounds and hillocks on all sides of them.

There were no nibblings. Streams and rivers were frozen hard. The wretched cattle swept along the road huddled together before a blinding wind out of the hill country, forerunner of a coming Chinook, but with its first blast intensifying the cold and lashing the last ounce of strength out of the lost and famished cattle.

They drifted blindly before the wind, driven against fence lines and trapped in coulee and gulch. Great white flakes began to fall like fairy birds drifting in the dazzling sunlight; like millions of feathers they fell upon the huddled herd, burying them under a mighty mound.

The only survivor of all that noble herd was the bull once known as "Prince Perfection Bar Q the IV," of whom the great specialist had predicted that he would startle the purebred world. Facing the west wind like a gladiator, the Prince turned from his fellows, and defiantly trod his way through the storm to where the outline of the hill country loomed up with its promise of shelter and food. Sniffing along the road allowances, pausing only to bellow his immense complaint, the massive brute pressed on his way.