| Show ror the The Sliiptons own a string of cow ranches on the Spike river in fact they own all the land worth owning which borders the river for These ranches are all ten miles much alike Each is a collection of log barns corrals bunk houses sheds and hay stacks located somewhere near the center of one of the thousand acre divisions into which the company’s land is divided I spent a month at one of these ranches once recovering from the effects of another month in a hospital and made a very pleasant friend of a young cow boy employed there One day to prove a point he was trying to make in an argument with me he told me the following story : “Old Dan the foreman died and one of the Shipton boys had taken charge of this ranch until a foreman could be found None of us worried as to who this foreman was going to be If you don’t like the foreman you can always leave but a lot of us who loved these old shacks and this country were hoping that he would be the kind we could stay with So we were not happy when Shipton told us that a young fellow from the East was to be given charge I left the Barretts over on the Short Horn because of an Eastern boss and most of the other fellows had had similar ex Negative periences Still he had come to one of the ranches as a common puncher early that spring and to have risen to foreman in so short a time was striking evidence if you knew the company of his worth But after the first sight of him we were all sure of him We lost all of that “wait until we try him out spirit” coldly critical and bordering on resentment which all new cow bosses meet From the time he swung from the saddle to the yard that first morning we gave him that fellowship for which other men have worked in vain for a dozen years “He was tall not heavy clean cut as a thoroughbred and had eyes and a face that were good to look at My first impression was that he was melancholy but I lost it in the handshake he gave me and was conscious only of a comradeship I had never felt before and that he was the most glorious specimen of manhood of all it takes to make a man that ever came into my life lie impressed the other fellows the same way and by sundown he owned the entire crowd even to the Chinaman who had never been friendly with any one before He handled the problems around the ranch in a way that gave the impression that he was made for bigger things than cow ranches |
