16 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 
of the ranch was much the same as it had been save 
that the ricks of alfalfa grew larger and larger each 
year and the problem of making and using the hay 
grew to be portentous. The mountains remained 
the same always, and the boy loved them deeply and 
climbed them eagerly, going up where never white 
man had been before, just to gaze off afar to other 
snowy ranges, and across sunny yellow valleys in 
the desert, beautiful from afar. All the cowboys 
loved him and worked faithfully for him; every one 
worked as hard as he could and the cattle waxed fat 
on a thousand hills. 
In November it was that the letter came, the letter 
written in that familiar crabbed yet plain handwrit- 
ing that the father used. Nearly always the father’s 
letters gave the boy much pleasure. He opened this 
one expecting it to be like the others that had come, 
but it was a shock to find in it a totally different 
note. It read like this: “My boy, I wish you to 
come home. Times are hard back here; hired men 
are no good any more. I am getting old and infirm. 
I need you very much. Come home and help me 
with the farm. I do not see how I can get along 
without you longer.” 
The letter gave the boy a rude shock. All at once 
he realized how he loved the wild ranch with its free- 
dom, its responsibility, its opportunities for doing 
things. He loved every hill and every mesa and 
every canyon. Half of the canyons he had named, 
some of them he only had ridden through. He 
loved the sun and air, the yellow bunchgrass, the 
