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had a large family and had built a home in town when they started coming of school age, and Scotty spend much of his time at the ranch alone in recent years, until a horse had fallen down a canyon wall with him and broke his left leg. He had lainout in the pasture a day and a night and by his toughness had managed to crawl and drag himself to his headquarters. It was still another day or two until anybody came by to find him. The final results of this was that Scotty lost his left leg … it had to be taken off. And it was durin’ this spell that his financial difficulties had occurred and that he had developed an unbearable temper and in a fit of rage had settled with the bank by giving them all his cattle, range delivery. However, he still owned all of his ranch land and his friends hoped that he would be able to start over when the bank finally got the cattle moved off the ranch.
    I rode out early next mornin’ after I had thanked the good doctor and his wife for a most enjoyable visit. I knew that I could catch some more cattle by myself, but I didn’t know how many. And it seemed that there weren’t any cowboys that were gonna be willin’ to help gather these cattle under the circumstances.
    I rode and worked hard by myself for the next two weeks and got thirty-two head, which was about a carload of cattle.
    By now I had learned something about runnin’ wild cattle in the Rockies that was just reverse from runnin’ wild cattle in the Southwest. In the Southwest cattle are usually in creek and river bottoms and around canyon pastures. The problem, generally speakin’, is to bring them out and up into open prairie regions where they can be caught or driven. Now in the Rockies wild cattle take to the high country where the boulders and cliffs make it almost impossible to run a horse, and the problem is to get them down out of the mountains into the valleysbelow, which are usually open, and makes it possible to drive or herd or do whatever else you need to do with them.
    My horses had begun to get acclimated to the high, light atmosphere, and the cattle had gotten wiser and wilder by the day—as the numbers dwindle, the work gets rougher in bad cow country.
    I managed to get a couple of high-school boys to come out on Saturday and help me drive the carload I had gathered to the railroad. They were good kids, but it was the early fall and they had started to school and I wasn’t gonna be able to run my business with just a little Saturday help.
    In all the cattle that I had gathered there hadn’t been one single pure-blooded Longhorn Scotch Highland cow. However, I had seen a few of them, but they were always at the front of the ones that were gettin’ away. They were a shaggy, brownish-red breed of cattle of medium size and were not the best beef cattle in the world; but due to their native Scottish breeding and their long hair they were good cattle for the bitter winters of the Rocky Mountains. The crossbreeds raised from Hereford and Durham crosses were wonderful cattle with lots of extra stamina gained from the cross with better beef qualities coming from the other side of the cross. The crossbreeds had more red in their color and were splashed about the head and neck and underbellies with white. All of them had a lot longer, higher-pointed horns than Herefords or Durhams, but nothing to compare with some of the Mexican-Texas cattle I had handled.
    I began to set snares and push rocks around to stop uptrails and had resorted to ropin’ and draggin’ one cow at a time, which got into hard work for me and my horses and in the long run gathered a very few cattle. I followed this kind of practice for about a month and there were still a lot more than a hundred cattle left in Scotty’s Canyon.
    Dr. Turner and I were settin’ in front of the mercantile on a bench whilin’ away the time one afternoon when a big, past-middle-age man with one peg leg started across the street.
    As I watched his approach, I looked