286 MY SPORTING HOLIDAYS 



was interested in a Wyoming cattle company, and 

 had spent the months of June and July in the com- 

 pany of our American manager, Frank Earnest, now 

 long since gathered to his fathers, assisting in the 

 purchase and removal of a herd of Utah cattle to our 

 Wyoming range, and in various business details con- 

 nected therewith. The cattle had been duly collected 

 and delivered at Green River corral, had been 

 tallied, and then hustled and punched into long trains 

 of cattle-cars, and duly run through to Rawlins, in 

 Wyoming, where our Pick outfit awaited to receive 

 them, and, after branding the calves, purposed subse- 

 quently to drive the herd of 2,000 cattle, or there- 

 abouts, on to Sand Creek Range, some seventy miles 

 north. 



It was a hot August day. For many hours the 

 Pick boys had been roping and branding yearlings 

 and calves in the cattle-yards about a mile outside 

 Rawlins. The air was thick with alkali dust. Over 

 the sage - brush - co vered rolling uplands, through 

 which ran the single line of the Union Pacific Rail- 

 road, hung a shimmering western haze beneath the 

 blazing sunshine that poured forth its relentless heat 

 from a deep-blue Wyoming sky, and yet a heat that 

 was tempered by the dry, exhilarating atmosphere of 

 an elevation 6,000 feet above the sea. 



I sat on the fence of the corral and watched the 

 scene beneath. The wild young cattle were hustled 

 hither and thither, as the raw-hide lariat swung by 

 sinewy arm was dropped deftly over the neck, or, 

 better still, was hitched round one or both hind-legs, 

 of the struggling calf or yearling that till then had 

 never felt the dreaded rope. Two of the best ropers 

 of Carbon County, mounted on handy western cow- 



