Sometimes he rode over to the home ranch for a day or two, but Mona was away studying music, so he found no inducement to remain, and drifted back to the little, sod-roofed cabin by the river, and to Gene.
The winter settled down with bared teeth like a bull-dog, and never a chinook came to temper the cold and give respite to man or beast.
Blizzards that held them, in fear of their lives, close to shelter for days, came down from the north; and with them came the drifting herds.
By hundreds they came, hurrying miserably before the storms.

When the wind lashed them without mercy even in the bottom-land, they pushed reluctantly out upon the snow-covered ice of the Missouri.

Then Gene and Thurston watching from their cabin window would ride out and turn them pitilessly back into the teeth of the storm.
They came by hundreds--thin, gaunt from cold and hunger.

They came by thousands, lowing their misery as they wandered aimlessly, seeking that which none might find: food and shelter and warmth for their chilled bodies.

When the Canada herds pushed down upon them the boys gave over trying to keep them north of the river; while they turned one bunch a dozen others were straggling out from shore, the timid following single file behind a leader more venturesome or more desperate than his fellows.
So the march went on and on: big, Southern-bred steer grappling the problem of his first Northern winter; thin-flanked cow with shivering, rough-coated calf trailing at her heels; humpbacked yearling with little nubs of horns telling that he was lately in his calfhood; red cattle, spotted cattle, white cattle, black cattle; white-faced Herefords, Short-horns, scrubs; Texas longhorns--of the sort invariably pictured in stampedes--still they came drifting out of the cold wilderness and on into wilderness as cold.
Through the shifting wall of the worst blizzard that season Thurston watched the weary, fruitless, endless march of the range.