To be alone, to live with nature, to feel the elements, to labor and dream and idle and climb and sleep unhampered by duty, by worry, by restriction, by the petty interests of men--this had always been his ideal of living.

Cowboys, riders, sheep-herders, farmers--these toiled on from one place and one job to another for the little money doled out to them.

Nothing beautiful, nothing significant had ever existed in that for him.

He had worked as a boy at every kind of range-work, and of all that humdrum waste of effort he had liked sawing wood best.

Once he had quit a job of branding cattle because the smell of burning hide, the bawl of the terrified calf, had sickened him.