He lived with two cowhands and a Ute halfbreed named Pete who could do everything a white cowhand could do and better except speak English. His English was a living torture. Mike didn’t like the set-up on his frontier ranch right at that moment and he hadn’t liked it all winter. He liked the fact that his brother had turned up with something like three thousand head of cattle, but he hadn’t liked the responsibility of wintering them. For one thing, he hadn’t been prepared and the cows had had to find their own food on the range. His hay would not have stretched to a hundredth part of a herd that size. So he knew some good beeves had died out there in the snow. These animals had never known snow. Maybe half of them were dead out there now. Sure they would drop some hardy calves, the cows that had survived, but that would not compensate them for the tremendous losses. Another thing he didn’t like were the men Dice had brought in here. Mike was a man who liked comparative solitude and wherever he went now there seemed to be a Kansas bravo under his feet.
