“Tomorrow week. See any other cattle on the hoof?”

“No… not on this track. Masterton’s sending in a mob… nine hundred, I heard. Well, better get on, I suppose. Aim to reachWhitchica some time tonight.”

“See you later.”

“You bet.”

Ezra Breen swung into his saddle. His sister slipped her leg over her horse’s head and put on her man’s felt hat. She smiled at Sam before turning her mount towards the distant river of beef. Ezra nodded and did not smile. Throughout the meeting he had not once smiled, and that was no oddity to Sam Laidlaw, who had known theBreens most of his life.

He clambered into the cabin of the transport and drove on up and over and down the succession of minor hillocks.

The basaltic cliffs of McDonald’s Stand rose to the sky to dominate Sam’s world for a little while. The track to theBreens ’ station branched away to skirt the western spurs of Black Range, leaving the main track to follow the eastern flanks all the way to Agar’s Lagoon. The Rockies, the Himalayas, the Andes, all are greater than these mountains, but none inall the world resemble them.

The air was dustless, as clear as distilled water. Black Range, now running roughly parallel with the track, might have been a mile to the westward and actually was something like twelve miles. Since leaving Wyndham, Sam had met with no travellers save theBreens. Wild donkeys watched him from the hillsides, and kangaroos languidly removed themselves. The eagles passed him from one to the next while he crawled through their territory, and the turkeys ran away on absurdly stiff legs.

At noon Sam stopped to brew tea and gnaw into bread and meat, and about an hour after that camp fire had been left behind, his little eyes glinted with swift interest. The transport was then crossing the summit of a ‘bump’, and before he could decide what the object was on the summit of another ‘bump’ two miles ahead, he was driving down to cross another of the interminable gullies. On his again seeing the object, it was much nearer and recognizable as an American jeep.