trees, and in the deep washes which carried the summer torrents from the sod-roofed hills into the stream. The one use that John Moore saw for the land was to take off of it with his cattle what nature had put on it for no other purpose under the clouds, according to his understanding and belief.
Cattlemen along the Arkansas were enjoying prosperous days. Moore had been one of the first with the courage to risk his capital on the belief that cattle could live off the range and withstand the winters of that bleak, unsheltered land. He hadn't much to risk in the beginning, to be sure, and he always played a lone game. He had been twenty years on the Arkansas, and now he was in the middle fifties, a man with a reputation for sagacity and good judgment, whose word was as good as money paid.
Moore had married late, going back to Missouri, his native state, for a woman of his own kind. She had become a typical range wife; his children were range born. His house was a rangeman's conception of distinction and comfort, a hideous gabled thing with a tower—an architect from Wichita had designed it, after the current cattle baron style—built of lumber, painted a bilious green, with staring white trimming around cornice, windows and doors. A veranda with spindling columns filled its front and curved around the tower, suggesting leisure, elegance and ease, three things as completely strange to the habits and desires of John Moore as a feather bed to a horse.
A few cottonwood and soft-maple trees had been planted around the house, but otherwise the situation
