Justin was startled by the changes which had come to Paradise Valley in the closing weeks of his long isolation in the mountains. Steve Harkness and Pearl Newcome were married, and Lucy Davison had been sent East to school. The latter filled him almost with a feeling of dismay. Among the other changes to be noted was that William Sanders had written letters to a number of farmers, some of whom were now in the valley and had taken government land or purchased mortgaged quarter-sections.

Justin discovered, in talks with them, that these men had been neighbors of Sanders on the irrigated lands at Sumner. They had sold out there, as Sanders had done, and having heard from him of the possibilities of Paradise Valley, they had moved to it, with their families and belongings. Others, it was reported, were coming. Some of them brought a few cows, as well as horses; and before the winter storms came they erected cheap dug-outs for themselves, and prepared flimsy shelters and cut wild hay for their stock. It was their intention to try irrigation.

Justin soothed his disappointment at not seeing Lucy Davison by writing many letters to her, to which she replied sparingly. He was away from home much of the time, riding lonely lines with other cowboys. Whenever he came home and found no letter from Lucy he felt discouraged; when one was there, he returned to his work cheered and comforted. As for Ben, Justin saw little of him. Davison kept them well apart, by giving them separate assignments.

In the severest of the winter storms, when the grass of the range had been covered with snow for many days, the cattle breached the fences, and mingling with cattle from other ranches they began to roam over the mesas and valley, a terror to the settlers, and as destructive as the locusts of Egypt. The cowboys could do nothing with them; could not hold them on the open lines, and could not repair the broken fences in the bitter cold and the blinding snow. It was a repetition in miniature of the days when the whole of the Great Plains was an open range, and cattle, shelterless and without food, wandered in the winter storms in pitiable distress, dying by thousands.

As it was useless and perilous to try to ride any line, Justin and the other cowboys came home. Justin’s feet and hands were frosted, and he went to Clayton’s, where he remained, to have the benefit of Clayton’s medical skill as well as his companionship.

Clayton was so troubled by the sufferings of the cattle that he could talk of little else. From his frost-covered windows weary bands of the starving animals could be seen ploughing through the drifts. In each band the largest and strongest were usually in the lead, breaking a way through the snow; the others followed, moving slowly and weakly, in single file, across the white wastes, their legs raw and bleeding from contact with the cutting snow-crust. Their hair was so filled with fine snow beaten in and compacted that often they resembled snow banks, and they were wild-eyed, and gaunt to emaciation.

Now and then a band would turn on its course and move back along the path it had broken, eating the frozen grass which the trampling had uncovered. Nothing in the way of food came amiss. The dry pods and stalks of the milk-weed and the heads of thistles protruding through the snow were hungrily snatched at. Unfenced stacks of wild hay prepared by the farmers and settlers for their own stock, disappeared like snow drifts in the spring sun, unless the owners were vigilant and courageous enough to beat back the desperate foragers. Many wild combats took place between the cattle and the exasperated farmers, and more than one man escaped narrowly the impaling horns of some infuriated steer. It seemed cruel to drive the cattle from the food they so much needed, but the farmers were forced to it.

Even Clayton and Justin found it necessary to issue forth, armed with prodding pitchforks, and fight with the famishing cattle for the stack of hay which Clayton had in store for his horse. He had fenced it in, but the cattle breached the fence and he could not repair it perfectly while the storm lasted.

“The cattle business as it is carried on in this country is certainly one of the most cruel forms of cruelty to animals,” Clayton declared, as he came in exhausted by one of these rights for the preservation of his little haystack. “The cattlemen provide no feed or shelter; in fact, with their immense herds that would be an impossible thing; and you see the result. Their method works well enough when the winters are mild, but more than half of them are not mild. Yet,” he continued sarcastically, “the cattlemen will tell you that it pays! If they do not lose over twenty per cent, in any one year the business can stand it. Think of it! A deliberate, coldblooded calculation which admits that twenty out of every hundred head of cattle may be sacrificed in this method of raising cattle on the open range! And the owners of the cattle will stand up and talk to you mildly about such heartless cruelty, and dare to call themselves men! Even Fogg will do it. As for Davison, I suppose he was born and bred to the business and doesn’t know any better. But it’s a burning shame.”

Justin was stirred as deeply. Clayton’s viewpoint had become his own. It lashed his conscience to feel that he was in some slight measure responsible for the condition he was witnessing. He was connected with the Davison ranch, if only as an employee. As for holding the cattle behind the fences and the open lines, that had not been possible; yet, if it could have been done, their condition would have been worse. By breaking away they were given more land to roam over, and that meant more milk-weed pods and thistle heads, and more slopes where a bit of frosted grass was bared by the knife-like winds, to say nothing of the stacks of hay now and then encountered.

Yes, it was a burning shame. Justin felt it; and he grew sick at heart as day by day he watched that tragedy of the unsheltered range, where hundreds of hapless cattle were yielding up their lives.