A Shot in the Dark

All the following night the storm moaned and raged, and the cold became more and more intense. It came in through the walls of houses and through bunk coverings, and bit at one like a living thing. Nothing could stop it, nothing unprotected could withstand it. In the great corral behind the windbreak, the cattle, all headed east, were jammed together for warmth, a conglomerate mass of brown heads and bodies from which projected a wilderness of horns.

The next morning broke with a clear sky but with the thermometer marking many degrees below zero. Out of doors, when the sun had arisen, the light was dazzling. As far as eye could reach not a spot of brown relieved the white. The layer of frozen snow lay like a vast carpet stretched tight from horizon to horizon. Although it was only snow, yet so far as the herds of the ranchers were concerned it might have been a protecting armor of steel. Well did the tired cowboys, stiff from the previous day's struggle, know what was before them, when at daylight Graham routed them out. Food the helpless multitude must have. If they could not find it for themselves it must be found for them; and in stolid disapproval the men ate a hasty breakfast by the light of a kerosene lamp and went forth to the inevitable.

Rankin and Ben and Graham were already astir, and under their supervision the campaign was rapidly begun. For a few days the stock must be fed on hay, and seven of the available fifteen men of the ranch force were detailed to keep full the great racks in the cattle stockade--a task in itself, with the myriad hungry mouths swarming on every hand, all but Herculean. The others, Rankin himself among the number, undertook the greater feat of in a measure opening the range for the future.