Running through dust, Barbie came to the culvert over the dried-up creek; across the flat off the road a hundred yards or so she saw the wagonet drawn up on the bank, and the squat black shape of a man freeing the horse from the shafts.

When the stray men have worked the herd, it is drove off a ways and turned loose. The calves in the cut-out groups are then branded and turned loose with their mothers; the strays are thrown into the stray herd or day herd.

O cruel fate, to be thusly boned. Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee.

Half the sky was checkered with black thunderheads, but all the west was luminous and clear: