What it meant, in practice, was that the Lazy H cattle ran on the open range with everybody else's cattle but were not the Association's concern. When the great roundup went out in the spring and the fall, with its wagons and its hundred riders and its foremen and its captains, the Lazy H cattle were gathered with the rest and cut out and turned back to Abram if he was there to claim them, and if he was not there, or if he was late, or if some foreman did not care to be bothered, they were not. Abram rode every roundup himself, with his bad shoulder, and took Zeke when the boy could be spared from my shop, and between them they had kept their herd together for five years.
In the fall roundup that September, they had found nineteen head.
Abram had come into my shop afterward to fetch the boy home. He was a big man, broader than me and half a head taller, very straight in the back, with gray in his short beard and a way of standing with his weight square on both feet that the Army had put into him and never taken out. He told me about it standing at my bench with his hat in his hands. Nineteen head out of a hundred and sixty-three, he said. Nineteen. Mostly old cows, the ones that hung close to the creek bottoms and would not travel. Every steer and every young heifer gone, as though the earth had opened.
"Winter-killed," the roundup foreman had told him. "Drifted south in the March storms and died in the coulees." But there had been no storms in March to speak of, that spring, and Abram had ridden every coulee from the Sybille to the Laramie River looking for bones, and found none. "Indians," a rider from the Thistle wagon had said, and laughed, and Abram had looked at him without expression until the laughing stopped. "Rustlers off the Sweetwater," somebody else had said. "Took 'em west across the Divide and sold 'em to the Mormons." That one had been said by Lon Prather, who was the foreman of the Thistle and the captain of that district's roundup that fall, and Abram had gone to the Association's inspector at Laramie with it and been told, very politely, that the Association was not in a position to investigate the losses of non-members.
"So they're gone," I'd said. "Abram, I'm sorry."
"They're not gone," he'd said. "They're someplace. A hundred and forty-four head of cattle don't go up in smoke." And he'd put his hat on and gone out with his boy, and I had stood at my bench and thought how hard it was, and then a man had come in with a broken wagon tire and I had gone back to my work.
That was the end of September. Now it was the second Tuesday of October, and I stood in my doorway with the rasp in my hand and Ballantyne's back going away down Front Street, and I had a feeling under my breastbone like a bar of iron that has been quenched too fast and is getting ready to crack.
It had been the middle of July, the hottest week of that summer, when the grass on the plains had gone the color of a lion and the wind had stopped blowing for the first time anyone could remember, and a man could hear the telegraph wires singing from a quarter mile off. I had both doors of the shop open and the shutters off the back window, and it was still like working inside a bread oven. Zeke had gone home to help his father put up hay on the creek bottoms. I was alone, upsetting the ends of a set of wagon axles for the Basque sheepmen who ran south of the railroad, when Lon Prather came in out of the glare.