The boys did their best, and half filled the car. Then some other impulse seized the bewildered rudimentary brains; the cattle balked. J.B. did it again, and yet again, until the cars were filled.
You have seen the cattle trains, rumbling slowly along, the crowded animals staring stupidly through the bars. They are not having a particularly hard time, considering the fact that they are undergoing their first experience in travelling. Nowadays they are not allowed to become thirsty; and they are too car sick to care about eating. Car sick? Certainly; just as you or I are car sick, no worse; only we do not need to travel unless we want to. At the end of the journey, often, they are too wobbly to stand up. This is not weakness, but dizziness from the unwonted motion. Once a fool S.P.C.A. officer ordered a number of the Captain's steers shot on the ground that they were too weak to live. That greenhorn got into fifty-seven varieties of trouble.
Arrived at their journey's end the steers were permitted to get their sea legs off; and then were driven slowly to a cattle paradise--the ranch.
For there was flowing water always near to the thirsty nose; and rich grazing; and wonderful wagons from which the fodder was thrown abundantly; and pleasant shade from a mild and beneficent sun. The thin, wiry beasts of the desert lost their angles; they became fat, and curly of hair, and sleek of coat, and much inclined to kink up their tails and cavort off in clumsy buck jumps just from the sheer joy of living. For now they were, in good truth, beef cattle, the aristocracy of fifty thousand, the pick of wide ranges, the total tangible wealth of a great principality. To see them would come red-faced men with broad hats and linen dusters; and their transfer meant dollars and dollars.
I have told you these things lest you might have concluded that the Captain did nothing but shoot ducks and quail and ride the polo ponies around the enclosure. As a matter of fact, the Captain was always going to Arizona, or coming back, or riding here or driving there. When we went to the ranch, he looked upon our visit as a vacation, but even then he could not shoot with us as often as we all would have liked. On the Arizona range were the [JH] ranch, and the Circle I, and the Bar O, and the Double R, and the Box Springs, and others whose picturesque names I have forgotten. To manage them were cowpunchers; and appertaining thereunto were Chinese cooks, and horses, and pump mules, and grub lists, and many other things. The ranch itself was even more complicated an affair; for, as I have indicated, it meant many activities besides cattle. And then there was the buying and selling and shipping. The Captain was a busy man.