Ernest Haycox

“There was a feeling about this hard to uncover, for he was not a self-analyzing man, never one to dig deeply into the source of his emotions. Facing this range, its good thick layer of fertility and its length and breadth, he came as close to it as he ever would come. It was a strength in his chest and in his muscles. The amber color of the short, nutritious suncured grass, sweeping on like a tawny and thick-napped carpet, had a meaning; the round green spots here and there in that tawniness, indicating water, had a meaning. The sunshine pouring down upon it and the shadows creased into occasional ridges, the wild, sweet smell of the land, the stillness, the free sweep, the quick wheel of cowbirds in the foreground and the faint blot of faraway cattle—all this had meaning. Beneath this grass was a generous, fecund earth. A man had to translate this richness into terms of cattle. But it wasn’t only cattle. Behind the cattle lay something else. Maybe a sense of personal growth, of pride, of something fought for and won, of large-handedness. It stiffened a man’s backbone and made him look at the world differently than other men looked at it. In his world certain things stood out; weather and water and grass and cattle; and himself against all the odds the range put against a lone man. He had his thoughts. They carried him at once into the past and presently he sent his glance all across the flats to the Lost Hills where, ten years before, he had started his married life with Lila. He remembered that one year vividly, as he remembered everything vividly that had to do with her; and he said to himself, “She should have lived to see this. Maybe it might have made a difference to her.” He slanted across the valley and rode up the narrow length of his older range, reaching home-quarters in the middle of the afternoon. As soon as he left the saddle old Mose gave him the latest news: Hack Breathitt had been pulled into a fight at War Pass, killing Liard Connor. Now Hack was hiding in the hills with Sheriff Nickum on his trail. Somebody had said, Mose added, that Herendeen had sent out a party under McGeen also to hunt Breathitt. Of that, Mose qualified, he wasn’t sure, but it sounded in the nature of the Three Pines beast. “I’m going to town,” decided Morgan at once, “and ought to be back around eight.” Old Mose said: “The way things are now, I wouldn’t skylark on the trail after dark. I’ve lived through a”
― Ernest Haycox, Saddle and Ride