A Paramount Picture. North of 36.
LOIS WILSON AS TAISIE LOCKHART.

NORTH OF 36

BY

EMERSON HOUGH

AUTHOR OF

THE COVERED WAGON,

54-40 OR FIGHT, Etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES

FROM THE PHOTOPLAY

A PARAMOUNT PICTURE

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

Copyright, 1923, by

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1923, by The Curtis Publishing Company

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

North of 36

CHAPTER I
IN THE MORNING

“MEN——” Taisie meant to say “Good morning, men,” as usually she did if she came to the cook house door before they had finished breakfast. But this morning she hesitated, halted.

There had been the usual mealtime silence of the cattle hands, broken only by rasp or chatter of steel on tin; but as the tall girl’s shadow fell at the door of the log house Jim Nabours, foreman of Del Sol, rose at his place. Fifteen other men pushed back their chairs nervously, staring at the boss as though caught in some overt criminal act. In the occupation of eating a regulation breakfast of beef and beans, cattle hands, time out of mind, have asked no aid and invited no company.

But Taisie Lockhart was their hereditary chieftainess. Her father, Colonel Burleson Lockhart, these two years deceased—a strong man in his day, and a poignant—had owned the Laguna del Sol range, of unknown acreage. Likewise, he had owned no man knew how many thousand head of long-horned cattle, from calves to mossy horns; owned yonder branching and rambling building of log and adobe called the big house; owned the round pens and the live-oak groves, the mast-fed range hogs and the nuts that fed them; owned bunk houses and cook house and corrals. Yes, and owned faith of body and soul of every man that lived on Del Sol, from old Salazar to the gawkiest ranch boy to put his saddle under the shed.

Heiress to all this, as her father had owned lands and herds and men, so did Taisie Lockhart. But to her, orphaned and alone, came an added fealty from her men that amounted almost to fanaticism. Most of them had known and loved her from her childhood. In her young womanhood they enshrined her.

The boss of Laguna del Sol now stood framed in the doorway, in man’s garb of shirt and trousers—an assumption shocking in that land and day. This costume she deliberately had assumed when she took on a man’s duties in a business preëminently masculine. Obviously now, she was tall, slender, supple, rounded to a full physical inheritance of womanly charm unhardened by years of life in the saddle and under the sun. More; she was an actual beauty. Anywhere else she would have been a sensation. Here, she spoiled each unfinished breakfast.

Against the morning light the freckles of Anastasie Lockhart could not be seen. No matter. Every man of these could have told you the number and contour of them each and all. In a way, too, they could have told you that her freckles went with her hair. The light that shone through the mass of dark red hair—long and unconfined she wore it, clubbed between her shoulders with a shoestring—lighted a thousand fronds into a sort of aureole, halo, crown. Not that this, either, was needed. For long, Taisie Lockhart, orphan owner of Laguna del Sol—just south of Stephen Austin’s first settlement in old Texas it lay—had been traditional saint, angel, to every creature that bore boots and spurs within a hundred miles. Nay, more than that; across two states—old Texas and old Louisiana—so far as interchange of information then went, before the day of telegraph and rails, men, and even women, spoke in hushed tones of Taisie Lockhart; the former out of awe at her beauty, the latter out of pity for her fate.

An orphan, left alone at twenty, just as she came home from her convent schooling at the ancient city of New Orleans, with no woman relative and no female companions other than her servants, what could be the fate of such a girl, seventy-five miles from the nearest town, twenty-five from the nearest rancho, and the rumor of her beauty continually spreading league by league? On her shoulders rested all the responsibilities of what was or had been one of the largest and richest ranches of Central Texas, and thereto was the responsibility for what manner of beauty sets mad the hearts of men.

Every woman in all Texas, at least in all the Texas of Bexar, Guadalupe, Comal, Gonzales and Caldwell counties, was sorry for Taisie Lockhart. She was trying to hold together the property left her by the sudden death—through murder—of her father, Burleson Lockhart, frontiersman on the bloody borders of the Southwest since 1831. And every woman wondered what man she would marry. Every woman also demanded that she marry soon.

An Alabama man Burleson Lockhart’s father had been; he himself was Louisianian up to his young manhood; and since then Texan, from a time before the Texas Republic was born. Add to Burleson Lockhart’s six feet of fighting manhood the tender beauty of Anastasie Brousseau, gentle and beautiful Louisiana girl, willing to leave her own plantation home among the moss-hung bayou lands for the red borders of Comanche land—and behold Taisie, present mistress of Del Sol, motherless since six, educated by her father in compliance with her mother’s steady wish, and now owner of a vast property that to-day would mean many millions.

But to-day in Texas is not the day of 1867. Yonder was a country wild, almost lawless, unfettered, savage; moreover just then roughened and wholly disheartened by the Civil War. In truth, taking her as she stood, within half a foot of six feet, beautiful despite her boots and trousers, Taisie Lockhart was no more than a dead-broke heiress to a potential but wholly dormant wealth, or to possessions which but now had vanished.

And that was why she now broke down in her morning salutation, even when all her men arose and joined Jim Nabours in silent attention.

“Men——” began the tall girl once more, and once more failed.

Then Taisie Lockhart ignominiously leaned her red head on her brown hand against the gray cook house door jamb and shed genuine feminine tears. Which act made every man present wish that he could do violence to something or somebody.

The boss was crying! Well, why? Had anything—had anybody——The eye of each looked to his wall nail, where, in ranch etiquette, he had hung his gun before taking up his knife and fork.

Jim Nabours cleared his throat. His Adam’s apple struggled convulsively, walking up and down his brown and sinewy neck. Taisie knew he wanted to speak.

“Men,” she began yet again, at last desperately facing them with undried eyes, and stepping fully into the long room, “I’ve come to say good-by to you. I’ve—we’ve—you’ve got to go!”

The men stood, shocked. What could she mean? Go? Where? What? Quit the brand? Leave Laguna del Sol? Leave her, the boss? What did that mean? Not even Jim Nabours could break the horrified silence, and he had been foreman these five and twenty years.

“Boys,” said Taisie Lockhart at last, suddenly spreading out her hands, “I’m done! I’m broke! I—I can’t pay you any more!”

And then Taisie Lockhart, owner of perhaps fifty thousand acres of land and what had once been fifty thousand cows, broke down absolutely. She cast herself on the board bench at one side of the clothless table, sunk her glorious head on her flung arms and wept; wept like a child in need of comfort. And there was none in all the world to comfort her, unless sixteen lean and gawky cow hands could do so; which, now patently, they could not.

“Miss Taisie, what you mean?” began Jim Nabours, after a very long time.

“Broke!” whispered Anastasie Lockhart collegiately. “Broke at last! Boys, I’m clean busted and for fair!”

“That ain’t no ways what I mean, Miss Taisie!” went on the anguished foreman. “Broke ain’t nothing. Yore paw was broke; everybody in all Texas is and always has been. Pay? He didn’t; nobody does. But what I—now, what I mean is, what do you mean when you say we got to go? What have we done? What you got against us?”

“Nothing, Jim.”

“Why, good Lord! There ain’t a man here that wouldn’t—that wouldn’t—indeed, ma’am, there ain’t, not one of us that wouldn’t—So now then, you say we got to go? Why? You’d ought to tell us why, anyways, ma’am. That’s only fair.”

The girl’s somber eyes looked full into his as she raised her head, one clenched hand still on the table top, the quirt loop still around the wrist. She faced business disaster with the courage many a business man has lacked.

“That’s what makes me cry,” said she simply. “It’s because you won’t go easy when I tell you. It’s because you’ll be wanting to keep on working for me for nothing. I can’t stand that. If I can hire you I’ve got to pay you. When I can’t, I’m done. Well, I can’t any more. I’d sell my piano for this month’s pay. I’ve tried to, but I can’t.”

“What? You’d sell the Del Sol pianny? Why, Miss Taisie, what you mean? I helped freight her up here from Galveston. That’s the onliest pianny in Middle Texas, far’s I know. That’s branded T. L., that pianny! And you’d sell her to pay a lot of measly cow hands wages they didn’t no ways ever half earn? Why, ma’am!”

Again sundry evolutions of the Adam’s apple of Mr. Nabours.

“Oh, I don’t doubt you’d stay on, because you’ve all worked around here so long. You’d all be careless about your wages; you’d do anything for me, yes. That’s because you think I’m a girl. You think you have to. I’m not—you don’t. I’m a business man, like any one else. If I can’t make Del Sol pay I’ve got to give it up; that’s all.

“I’m four months behind now,” she added, “and not one of you has whimpered. The store’s naked and you know it. Some of you even may be out of tobacco, but you don’t complain. That’s what cuts me. You’re the finest bunch of hands that ever crossed leather, and I can’t pay you. All right! If I can’t, you can’t work for me.”

“But, Miss Taisie, ma’am,” struggled her foreman, “ ’tain’t nothing a-tall. What’s a few pesos one way or other? We can’t buy nothing, nohow, even if we had money, and don’t want to, noways.

“Besides, what’d become of us? Besides, what’d become of you? Have you ever thought of that? Didn’t I promise yore paw, and yore maw, too, that I’d look after you and yore interests long as we was both alive? Well, then?

“I ain’t got much savvy outside of cows, ma’am,” he went on; “but cows I do know well as the next. It’s all cows, this part of Texas, and we all know it. There ain’t no market and never will be. We can’t sell cows at six bits a head, or a hide, neither, and we all know that—everybody’s got cows that ain’t worth a damn, ma’am, of course. But what I mean is, if the T. L. can’t make a living there ain’t no ranch in Texas can. I don’t put my hands back of no outfit in the world, ma’am. We’ve run the T. L. on over twelve hundred head of loose stuff this winter, and I told the boys to pick the yearlings and twos careful.”

His eyes shifted, he perspired.

“We got plenty of water and all outdoors. We didn’t lose one per cent last summer, and winters was when we didn’t lose nothing. The increase is a crime, ma’am. If we’d hold a rodeo in our band—which we’d ought to—God knows how many we’d find in the T. L. I’d bet sixty-five thousand! And the mesquite full of long ears that no man claims. If we can’t do well no stockman in Texas can.”

His eyes avoided hers as he gave these Homerically mendacious figures. But he went on stoutly:

“Yet you talk of quitting! Why should you? The old Laguna is the richest range in Texas. Our grass sets ’em out a hundred and fifty a head heavier than them damned coasters from below, ma’am.

“And if you talk of turning off us men, where’d we go? What’d we do? I ask you that, anyways, ma’am.”

“If there was any market,” began Taisie, “it would be different. As it is, the more we brand the poorer we get.”

“Well, all right; we ain’t any poorer than our neighbors. Market? Of course there ain’t no market! Rockport has failed—canning cows don’t pay. Hides is low. There’s nothing in the steamship trade, and no use driving East since the war is over. Besides, with such good water and range as we got on Del Sol, why, nothing ever dies; so there ain’t no hides no more.

“As for long ears, slicks, we’re as good off as old Sam Maverick, that wouldn’t never bother to brand nothing hardly, and so found hisself swamped when the war was over. We got less unworked long-ear range west of us than anybody, but nobody tries to sell hides or cows now. The New Orleans market costs more to get a cow to than the cow comes to when he’s there. The steamships has us choked off of everything east of us; we can’t ship nothing and break even on it. Every one of us knows that, of course.”

“Too many cows!” Taisie’s head shook from side to side.

“Yes! Enduring the war, cows just growed like flies in here and all over Texas. Market? No, that’s so. But when you once get to raising cows, ma’am, and branding cows that no one else has raised, and seeing the herds roll up and roll up—why, it’s no use! No cattleman can do no different. If we had a market—why, yes. We hain’t, and ain’t going to have; but what’s the use crying over that? Shall every stockman in Texas lay down and quit cows just because he can’t sell cows and ain’t got no market? If he does the state might as well quit being a state. It might as well, anyhow, since the damn Yankees taken it over to run since the war.”

The shadow of Reconstruction was on Jim Nabours’ face. And what he said covered the whole story of the general destitution of an unmeasured empire tenanted by uncounted millions of Nature’s tribute to life when left alone. This was Texas after the Civil War, impoverished amid such bounty of wild Nature as no other part of this great republic ever has known. The first Saxon owner of Laguna del Sol paid for some of it in Texas land scrip that had not cost him two and a half cents an acre. His original land grant had cost him less. Scrip went in blocks and bales, held worthless. Men laughed at those who owned it. Land? It could never fail. The world was wide; the sun was kind; life was an easy, indolent, certain thing.

Nothing less than a section of land was covered by scrip. It was nothing to own a thousand sections, if one liked to fad it. And, since a hundred thousand cattle might roam there unmolested and uncounted, it literally was true that every man in Texas was land poor and cow poor—if he was so ignorant and foolish as to buy land scrip at two to five cents an acre when he might have all the range he liked for nothing at all, and all the cows he cared for without the bother of counting them.

It was genesis. It was still in the beginning, in the Texas of 1867, where the Americans had just begun to extend the thin antennæ of the Saxon civilization. Here was a life for a bold man, rude, careless, free, independent of law and government. A world unbounded, inestimable, lay in the making.

But any who could have read fully this little drama at the cook house would have known that world to be tenanted by folk embittered by the war and ready to say that their world now was made and done. Of these, Taisie Lockhart, orphan loaded with riches that could not be rendered portable or divisible, made one more unhappy unit. She was, naturally, far the more unhappy because through her education she had found a wider outlook on life and the world than had these others. Somewhere, too, in her stern ancestry had been a sense of personal honor which left her still more sensitive.

But the immortal gods take pity on the sorrows of youth and beauty, it may chance. They have their own ways, employ agents of their own selecting. This orphan heiress, keen to pay her debts, became one of the first factors in one of the most Homeric epochs in the history of all the world. Not so long after this woebegone meeting of bankrupt cattle folk at the Del Sol cook house there was to appear a phenomenon that set at naught all customs, that asked no precedent, that defied even the ancient laws of section and of latitude. All of which did not just now develop.

“Set down, Miss Taisie,” said the gray old foreman, awkwardly, gently, flushing at asking the owner of Del Sol to be seated in her own cook house. She had arisen, and, hands at her eyes, was about to leave the place. Now she dropped back and looked at him dumbly, suddenly no more than a weak girl at her wits’ end.

“Now listen to me, Miss Taisie,” began old Jim Nabours with sudden firmness. “You know I’ve worked for yore folks all my life, ever since I come down from the Brazos forty years ago. I come back here when the war stopped—Kirby Smith’s men on the Lower Red was the last to surrender. This is my place, that’s all.

“Now, I got a right to talk plain to you. I’m a-going to. When you say you’re going to turn off a bunch of the best cow hands in Texas, just because you can’t pay their wages no more, why, then you ain’t showing reason ner judgment I’m foreman for the T. L. brand. What I say goes. When you say we’re turned loose you’re talking foolish. We ain’t! What’s wages to us? I’d like for you to tell me. Did we get any in the Army? Does anybody pay wages now, in all Texas? How can they?

“Miss Taisie, I went with yore paw to Austin, when he was a member, and in the big Assembly Room was a man at a desk with a hammer, and says he, ever oncet in a while, ‘Motion done overruled!’ Then he soaks the table with the hammer. And now, ma’am, yore motion about firing sixteen good cow hands is done overruled!”

Jim Nabours’ great fist fell with the force of a gavel on the breakfast table, till the tin plates rattled under their two-tined forks and the nicked cups brought added antiphony. Frowning, he looked savagely at the young woman. He was no better than her peon for life, for her father had given her to his care. She was the very apple of his eye.

“But what are we going to do, Jim?” Taisie’s tears now were less open and unashamed.

“What makes you ask that of me, ma’am? I ain’t got that fur along yet. I don’t know what we’re going to do. But I do know, for first, we ain’t going to quit. Fire us? Why, good God!”

The grizzled beard of Jim Nabours to some extent concealed the Adam’s apple, now again on its travels. There was not a man in the embarrassed group who did not wish himself in the chaparral precisely then, but every man of them nodded in assent. Of them all only old Sanchez, thin, brown and wrinkled, spoke at first—an old, old Mexican, born on Del Sol under its second transfer from the crown of Spain.

“Si, señorita,” said he. “Es verdad!”

“Shore it’s the truth!” broke out a freckled youth of seventeen, the soft beard just showing on his cheeks. But then, as he later confessed, he plumb bogged down. And the youngest of them all—Cinquo Centavas, they called him, since he had but five copper pennies when he rode in, twelve years of age; he was now fourteen—stood with his blue eyes wet with tears, unashamed in his rags.

“Give me time to think, men!” said Anastasie Lockhart, immeasurably touched by all this. “Let me see. Wait—I don’t know!”

She rose and went to the door, framed once more gloriously against the sun; and sixteen pairs of eyes of silent men went with her.

A sudden baying of the ranch pack of foxhounds arose. It was not directed toward her. The dogs were streaming toward the pole gate of the yard fence. A rider was coming in.

CHAPTER II
A NEW WORLD

IT WAS not the custom of the young mistress of Del Sol to ride out to meet strangers at her gate. She received callers in her own rude office or her almost ruder parlor. To meet any caller on this morning was distasteful to her every thought. She gave the incomer only a glance as she walked to her horse, which stood, head drooping, anchored by the long bridle reins thrown down.

A peculiar animal, Taisie’s favorite mount, so marked as to be distinguished anywhere. No doubt descended from Blanco, the great white wild horse whose menada ran on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos, Blancocito’s dam must have been a buckskin, for he himself was a dark claybank, with the coveted black stripe along his back. But Blanco—said by some range men to be not many removes from Arabian, though of unknown origin—had given his son a white face, four white stockings and a singular harnesslike stripe of clean white, four inches wide, across both hips, running down almost to the white stockings of the hind legs. He could be told a mile away. It would have been of no use to steal him, and his shoulder brand was but perfunctory. Jim Nabours and most of the hands scoffed at any pinto, and selected solid colors—any color so only it was not black; but Blancocito put all their horsely wisdom to shame. He never tired and never quit. No trail was too long for him. Gentled when a three, he never wholly had surrendered even to Taisie or the best of Taisie’s top riders his inalienable Texas right to life, liberty and the pursuit of pitching, though these tendencies he usually held in abeyance in the case of his mistress. When he liked, he could be “mean to set,” according to some others.

Just now Blancocito bit at the arm of his rider as she flung the reins over his neck and facing back, got foot in the stirrup and right hand on the horn of the cow saddle, true vaquero fashion. As she swung up to the seat his forefeet left the ground.

“Quit it!” said Taisie to him, and slapped his neck.

Then Blancocito bit at the tapaderos—gently, for he meant no harm; pitched just a little, with no malice in his heart; and so settled down to the springiest jog trot of any and all the horses in the T. L. brand; a gait which he could keep all day, and did keep now for two or three hundred yards, till his rider swung out of saddle at her own door and threw down the reins again.

Distrait as she was, Taisie Lockhart had not failed to note from the corner of an eye the young man who had entered the gate. He had hesitated an instant before choosing the cook house as his objective. She let him take the cook house, though with a swift doubt that he would stay there.

A tall man he was, perhaps twenty-five, perhaps thirty; slender, brown, with dark hair a trifle long, as so many men of that land then wore their hair. His face, contrary to the custom of the country, was smooth shaven, save for a narrow dark mustache. His eyes, could Taisie have seen them, were blue-gray, singularly keen and straight, his mouth keen and straight, unsmiling. He left the impression of a nature hard, cold; or at least much self-contained.

These last details the mistress of Del Sol could not at the time note, but she was schooled to catch the brand of his horse, the fashion of his equipment. His saddle was deeply embossed, not lacking silver, and the light and thin ear bridle, above the heavy hand-wrought bit, was decorated along the cheek straps with tapering rows of silver conchas polished to mirror brightness. The long reins he held high and light, and rode as though he did not know that he was riding, his close-booted feet light in the tapaderos. His horse, a silver-tail sorrel, was a trifle jaded. If so, at early morning, the coat rolled at the cantle most likely must have been his blanket the night preceding; for it was far from Laguna del Sol to the next open door of the range.

None of these matters escaped Taisie Lockhart, used to reading and remembering men, cows and horses at a glance. Her range education had taught her much, but it was rather instinct told her that this man was neither fop nor plain cow hand. He had an air about him, a way with him, an eye in his head thereto; for Taisie knew that, even as she had made inventory of him, he had done as much or more with her, though he did not salute as he jogged off to the door near which the ranch hands now were standing. In sooth, Taisie had forgotten for the time that, garbed as she was, she looked like some long-limbed foppish boy who wore his hair long down his shoulders.

“Light, stranger!” Nabours gave the arrival the usual greeting of the land. A dozen pairs of eyes gave him appraisal of the range. But the etiquette of the range was custom with this visitor. Though he was forced to wheel his horse quite about to do so, he dismounted on the same side of his horse as that which his hosts held, and not upon the opposite, or hostile, side. Moreover, he unbuckled his revolver belt and hung it over the horn of his saddle before entering the door. So! He had good manners. He was welcome.

“How, friends?” he said briefly, in return to the greeting. “McMasters is my name. I’m from Gonzales.”

Nabours nodded.

“I know you,” said he. “You’re the new sher’f down there.”

He was asked no questions. Some of the men already were saddling. The young horse wrangler was shaking up the remuda in the round pen, men were roping their mounts. Jim Nabours, foreman, and responsible for hospitality, no more than moved a hand of invitation. The newcomer seated himself at the long table, just abandoned. The negro cook appeared, bearing renewals. The guest ate in silence. Had Taisie seen him she would have noted some indefinable difference in his table manners from those of the cattle hands who but now had left this same rude board; but he ate with no shrug of criticism.

Nabours awaited his pleasure. Silence was the custom. There were some silent moments before the stranger pushed back and turned.

“I had to lie out last night at the river,” said he. “Fresh javelina isn’t bad if you like it. I rather prefer your bacon here.”

Nabours grinned.

“You’d orto have rid on in.”

“The trail has changed since I was here. Of course, I used to know Del Sol. My father, Calvin McMasters—you’ve heard of him?—was a friend of Colonel Burleson Lockhart forty years back. They died together, and in the same way—you know how. But I was away three years with my regiment, and lately I’ve never got around to ride up the hundred miles from the south.”

“You’re riding back from north now?”

“Yes.”

“Far?”

“From Arkansas.”

“So?”

“Yes. I came down the Washita and crossed the Red at the Station, in from the Nations.”

“How’s that country up in there for cows?” asked Jim Nabours, with the cowman’s invariable interest in new lands. “I never been acrost the Red. Palo Pinto’s about the limit I make for hunting our cows on the north.”

“Good range all the way through the Nations; good all the way from here across the Red and clean up to what they call the Kansas line—that’s above the Cherokee Outlet. I was in east, along the Arkansas line.”

“Water?”

“Plenty.”

Nabours remained silent for a time.

“Tell me, friend,” said he at length. “How about Colonel Lockhart’s old notion? He worked some cows north, like, on the Jess Chisholm Trail, up along the Washita, north of the Red somewheres. Arkansaw was where he went, and the last time he went he didn’t never come back.”

The faces of both men were grave. The murder of Burleson Lockhart and Calvin McMasters by the ruffians of the Arkansas border was an open wound for all Central Texas.

“The Chisholm Trail isn’t any trail,” said the stranger. “I came down that way myself, west of Wichita, but Jesse never did herd anything much over it. He did drive two-three little bunches from the Red River to Little Rock, Arkansas, not over a thousand head in all; but like as not he got the idea from my father and Colonel Lockhart. They both always said that Texas would have to find a market north.

“You see, they all had the good old Texas idea about starting a beef cannery to market our surplus cows. Some folks called Fowlers started to pack at Little Rock. Their meat all spoiled and it broke the whole outfit. Jess Chisholm didn’t drive to Little Rock again. And you know my father and Burleson Lockhart paid their lives for their experiment. They wanted to do something for Texas.”

“Several men has tried driving cows into Arkansaw, even Illinois, even Missoury and Ioway,” commented the foreman of Del Sol. “Bad stories comes down—herds stole by bushwhackers and desperadoes, drovers robbed, stripped, tied up and whipped, drove out of the country, sent home broke or else left dead like them two good men. It’s bad along the Arkansaw and Missoury border. Plenty others has been killed up there. Bad business. Us Texans ought to even up a lot of things.”

“Yes!” A sudden strange flash came into the gray eye of the young stranger. “I ought to know!”

Nabours’ own keen eye narrowed.

“It’s not safe to drive that way? Don’t you think that’s all foolishness?”

“It has been, so far.”

“But then, men has done told me that Chisholm had a right good road, grass and water, clean north.”

“No, he didn’t do much. He only had an idea that’s old in Texas—a beef market.”

“If Texas had a market for her beef! Eh? We’d all be rich.”

Nabours tried to remain calm. The thought was by no means new to him or to many other Texans, broad-minded and farseeing men like those two early martyrs of the trail.

“Well, Jesse only followed the road that crossed the Canadian at Roberts’ Ferry—the old Whisky Trail. He headed west instead of north, after a while. He went up the Brazos and west across to the Concho with a bunch of cows. He knew there was a military market at Fort Sumner, on the Pecos, over in New Mexico. So he made the big two-day dry drive west of the Concho. He hit the Pecos at the Horsehead Crossing and worked up to Sumner. Loving and Goodnight had a trail north of Sumner—clean up into Colorado. Army posts and reservations all have got to have beef, and a lot of it. Yes, that’s going to make a market some day. If we herd the Indians they’ve all got to eat.”

“Seguro! Shore they have! They feed the damned Comanches, and the Comanches shoot up and murder every outfit that tracks west to the Pecos—every drive out there means a half dozen Indian fights. No money in that.

“No, nor no money in anything that has anything to do with cows,” Nabours continued. “Look at the record. Rockport, Indianola, Galveston, Mobile, New Orleans, Little Rock, Illinois, Ioway—all them foreign countries, full of damn Yankees and thieves. What ghostly chance has a Texas stockman got? I’d as soon eat javelin’ as beef—it ain’t so common, and it costs more. There’s cows thicker’n lizards all the way from Matagorda to Doan’s Store on the Red, and west far’s the Staked Plains. We’re busted, friend. The South is licked. We’ve got a carpetbag government and no hope of any change. If all Texas was worth one solitary whoop in hell do you reckon you could buy a mile square of vine-mesquite grass land for fourteen dollars? Not that I would, or could—I haven’t got the fourteen dollars. No, nor it don’t look like any stockman in this whole state ever will have fourteen dollars, the whole caboodle, from Santone to the Sabine. This is the poorest place in the whole damned world, Texas is, and I’m here for to prove it.”

Jim Nabours’ long-pent dissatisfaction had led him into the longest speech of his entire life. He knew he had an understanding hearer in this grave young man from Gonzales, who nodded, noncommittal as heretofore. Nabours went on.

“And yet,” said he vehemently, “why, now, Miss Taisie, that owns this ranch brand, now, she wants to try it again, north! Would you believe that? Wasn’t her father murdered by them damned people that beat up pore Jimmy Dougherty on the Missoury border two years ago? Huh! He was crazy to drive north. What did it bring him? His death, and the ruin of Del Sol!

“That girl’s been wanting, all this month, to make up a herd and drive north! Can you figure that out? Her a child, you might say, wanting to do what her father couldn’t do, and take chances that cost him his life! Crazy, that’s all. But who ever changed a Lockhart?

“And now, right here, this very morning”—Nabours beat on the table with his fist—“she comes in and declares herself. Says she’s broke and can’t pay her hands. Turns us all loose—every man! Her a girl only twenty-two, a orphant at that, and not a soul to take care of her! Great God! Well, that’s what cows comes to in Texas.”

The young man nodded, still silent, his face grave.

“Of course,” resumed Nabours, “we wouldn’t go. Shore, we ain’t had no wages for a spell; but who has? And what has wages got to do with it, us working for a orphant, and that particular orphant being the Del Sol boss? Quit? Why I’ve worked on the brand forty years, man and boy! I couldn’t quit nohow, if I tried. She ought to know that. Makes me mad.”

“Perhaps she thought of how her father always paid. She has his sense of honor.”

“Well, we didn’t go. I just told the boys to go on out and brand long ears, like we been doing since the war. There ain’t no money in it. I did hope we’d have a hard winter, to kill off some of the range stock. What do we get? Two soft winters when the flies didn’t die! Not a half of one per cent loss, and the whole ungodly world getting so damned full of calves that a man couldn’t make a living skinning dead stock on the water fronts, not if he had twelve pairs of hands! Dead? There ain’t no dead—they’re all alive! What’s worse, they keep getting aliver. This whole state, come couple more mild winters, ’ll turn into tails and horns. And if I needed a new saddle or a pair of boots I’d have to steal them. Yet that girl, she’s made life miserable for me to drive three thousand head north and get some money to pay us hands. You and me know that’s foolish.”

“Is it, though?”

Nabours looked at him suddenly.

“How else?”

“Well, I’ve just come down from that country. To-day there’s something new up north.”

“New?”

“Yes, plumb new. I don’t mean Baxter Springs or Little Rock.”

“You don’t mean a real market north!”

“That is what I do mean! There’ll be money in driving north after this spring.”

Nabours looked at him for a time in silence.

“You’ll have to show me how, Mr. McMasters. I ain’t never been north of the Red, nor west of the Concho, though south of the Rio Grande, plenty. What I’ve learned is, a cow ain’t worth a damn, and any cow man’s a idjit, and he can’t help keeping on being one.”

“Very well, listen! The Kansas Pacific Railroad is building west across Kansas this spring as fast as they can lay rails. At the last town—that’s Abilene—some men pat their heads together on precisely this question that’s got us all guessing. A cow is worth four dollars—three—nothing down here. At the railroad he’s worth ten, maybe more. East, he’s worth twenty, maybe more. They need beef, and we’ve got beef, or the making of it. It needs no watchmaking to figure that this deadlock has got to break.

“Now, they’ve taken a chance at Abilene; they’ve put up shipping pens—so they told me at Wichita. They said you could follow up the Washita and cross the Canadian and go north; then hit in west of Wichita and swing north across the Arkansas to Abilene. And there’s the market, man!

“That’s the biggest news that ever came to Texas. It’s bigger than San Jacinto. You know what that means, if you could get a herd through? Well, I’d say your boss had a good head on her shoulders.”

Nabours sat silent, stupefied.

“I came in here through Caldwell,” the visitor went on now, explanatory. “I’ve ridden over a perfectly practical trail for nearly a thousand miles so far as grass and water are concerned. I thought I’d bring this news in to Del Sol. I’ve known the Burleson Lockhart family all my life, of course, and of the hard place Colonel Lockhart’s daughter has been forced into by his death. I wanted to ride in and see her, the first time since we were children.”

The young man colored just a trace as he went on. “I wanted to bring her, as owner of a Texas brand, the news of the new market,” said he. “Is she at home?”

“Didn’t you see her when you came in?”

McMasters hesitated.

“I saw a young man. I didn’t just know——”

The foreman smiled.

“I couldn’t blame you. Well, I’m the only mother that girl has got left. I’m one hell of a mother! But still, I don’t see why you didn’t ride on up to the front door.”

The young man’s face flushed rather hotly, but he was guilty of no nervousness, did not even smile.

“No man could come on better business,” said he. “It was not her fault. She did not know me, nor I her.”

“You must go on up to the house,” said Nabours. “First tell me, what took you north?”

McMasters looked at him in his cold way.

“Well,” said he finally, “I’m a peace officer. I’ve been sheriff of Gonzales for six months. Perhaps you haven’t heard the latest news about the Rangers. In spite of our carpetbagging friends, they’re organized again, stronger than before the war, and with more to do. They gave me the honor of electing me a captain. I’ve been up north on a certain business.”

Nabours nodded now silently.

“There’s not a man here or in Central Texas that ain’t sworn to kill the murderer of them two men, if ever he is found. You know that, Mr. McMasters.”

“Yes! Nor is your oath more strong than mine.”

McMasters turned to the silent negro, who had brought in a pan of water and a towel. As he turned up his sleeves, the cuffs of his linen shirt—as the rolled soft collar also might before then have disclosed—showed a dull red, not white. He laughed.

“A superstition,” said he, nodding. “Sort of oath of the family. In the war my mother had to dye her own clothing with pokeberry. She dyed a few of my father’s shirts that way by mistake once. My father was so proud of our sacrifices to the cause—though he didn’t think Texas should have seceded—that he swore he’d never have collars or cuffs any other color. Well, a new sheriff in Gonzales hasn’t so many shirts. This one was once my father’s. Yes, we’re poor—poor, we Texans.

“Turn my horse in the round pen, please, sir,” he concluded, when he had made himself neat as possible. “Would you please ask Miss Lockhart if she will see Mr. Dan McMasters, the son of her father’s friend?”

CHAPTER III
THE ORPHAN OF DEL SOL

BLANCOCITO had dozed in the sun for a considerable interval. Hearing a sound at the front door, he turned an idle eye, and sprang back with a snort at sight of the unusual apparition which now descended the gallery steps—Anastasie Lockhart, no longer in male apparel, and by the merest accident coming out of the house as the two men would now have entered.

Jim Nabours was not accustomed to social formulas.

“Miss Taisie, this here is Mr. McMasters, of Gonzales, below. He’s sher’f down there. I reckon you know who he is.”

“I saw you when you came in, sir,” said the mistress of Del Sol demurely, extending her hand. “Why did you not come up to breakfast?”

While McMasters, his eyes fixed on hers, was explaining his travel-worn condition, Jim Nabours was wondering how and why in the name of all the saints of the Southwest Taisie had managed in so short a time to change from her daily ranch costume to this feminine marvel of fresh lawn, with ruffled flounces and great belled skirt. She even had white mitts—yellow-white with age. But Taisie saw no reason to explain that much of her apparel once had been her mother’s, and was now fresh resurrected. Jim did not know the mysteries of a certain rawhide chest so well as old black Milly, who had served in the Burleson Lockhart family before they moved into the border country. Had he known he might also have had a guess at the miracle of Taisie’s heavy hair, no longer banded like an Indian woman’s but done up in some sort of high twisted mass that left visible the milk-white nape of a neck not always otherwise protected against the sun.

In good truth Anastasie—such was her mother’s Louisiana name in baptism, and her own—was not unmindful of the ways of woman in older lands, in spite of the surroundings into which fate had cast her. And truly she was beautiful—rarely, astonishingly, confusingly beautiful. The man did not live who could have seen her now and not have felt his heart leap to joy in the universe and its ways.

She led them back into the house. Her very presence filled the low-ceiled room, one of the two at the right of the four corners made by the right-angled double halls. The adobe ranch house of Del Sol was built like others of the Saxon Southwest, so that each breath of air might be caught from any direction of the wind; an arrangement cooler than a patio for a house surrounded on two sides by a grove of giant live oaks draped heavily in Spanish moss.

The interior gave a rude setting for a picture such as this young woman made. The ease and luxury of lower Louisiana, for a wealthy generation of sugar-cane planters the repository of Europe’s best art and last luxuries, were not reflected in the first Saxon generation of the Texas border. True, the furniture in part was traceable to earlier days. Two paintings, three framed samplers, told of a mother’s hands. There was a heavy claw-foot table. A few mismated chairs of the Empire stood in a row. But a rawhide settee and four splat-bottom chairs frankly admitted the limit of such supplies; the prevailing flavor of the borderland could not be denied. Not so much of a marvel, for at that time there was not a hundred miles of railroad within the boundaries of Texas, and everything from the East must survive the toil and danger of wagon freighting.

In one corner of the room was a conical upright Mexican fireplace. Opposed to this and covered with soft tanned baby-calfskins of varied colors, stood the one thing which had saved the soul of Anastasie Lockhart the first, as of Anastasie the second—the piano, regarded with awe by all the cattle hands. On the piano stood, now, a vase of flowers. They were very fresh flowers. Jim Nabours knew they had not been there an hour earlier, for he had called before breakfast and they were not there then; though he knew Taisie’s garden had some blossoms.

What shall escape the eye of a maiden? Tapered conchas on a bridle strap, neat boots, a well-shaped hat, a way of sitting in a saddle, the air of a family that had once come down from Tennessee on the Natchez Trace and the Old River Road, to Louisiana, to Texas? Nay, not so easily are a maid’s eyes baffled, though she shall have had but a single look at a newcome young man opening her gate a hundred yards away. Hence these flowers, hence this frock, the reason for which Jim Nabours could not analyze.

Mr. Dan McMasters, new sheriff of Gonzales, mighty young for that job, was a proper man. A vague sense of uneasiness came to the soul of Foreman Jim as he saw his comeliness and ease of manner. He felt he had been betrayed—did not feel familiar with these new little ways.

“You see, Miss Lockhart,” went on McMasters when he had taken his own seat on the cowhide settee, “I’ve been north, up the Indian roads. As I was only fifty miles away, I thought I would ride in.”

“You are very welcome, sir. Our families always have been friends.”

The voice of Anastasie Lockhart was the color of her hair. Almost, you could call her hair vibrant.

“Yes, my family always has known your family. I wanted to see you once more. That must have been my main reason. You—you have grown, Miss Lockhart. I’d not have known you. But just now I was talking with your segundo. He thought you might like to hear some word I am bringing down to Texas from the North.”

“He means they’ve started a cattle market up North on the railroad, Miss Taisie,” broke in Jim Nabours.

“Market? There’s going to be a shipping point—do you mean that, sir?” The girl turned swiftly.

“I think so, yes,” replied Dan McMasters. “It’s at Abilene, in Kansas, right north of Wichita. You see, Wichita’s not far across the Kansas line, above the Nations.”

“Abilene?”

“No one ever heard of it. It’s head of the rails on the Kansas Pacific, the new road that’s building west. They want cattle. They are promising a market.”

The girl’s eyes kindled.

“That’s news!”

He nodded.

“Yes. The railroads are planning to run up the Arkansas the same as up the Platte—and that’s done, now. That whole country north of here, from all I can hear about it, is a thousand by two thousand miles of natural cow land. Grass? They tell me that farther on west there’s millions of acres of what they call buffalo grass—short, like our grama. Maybe it won’t carry cows, but some say it will. It certainly fattens the buffalo. And there isn’t a cow in it all; it’s empty and waiting for range stock—to say nothing of the Eastern demand.”

Nabours broke in.

“We know we could herd as far as Wichita. Shore we could get from there to Aberlene.”

“Yes,” said this prophet of a new day; “and we would find Eastern buyers—farmers and feeders and beef men—waiting to buy our stuff as fast as we drove it through.”

“Really?” Taisie Lockhart almost forgot her morning’s troubles. “Really?”

“Why, yes, I reckon it’s true, from what the men told me that came down to cut the trail in the Nations. They declare there’ll be buyers for all we can drive, up to a hundred thousand head—yes, two-three hundred thousand!”

Inarticulate sound came in Anastasie’s throat. She cast a triumphant glance at her foreman.

“Well, now, ma’am, how was I to know?” defended Jim. “I never did hear of no Aberlene, not in my whole life, till this young gentleman rid in here this morning.”

“Well, you ought to have heard of it!” rejoined his employer with a woman’s logic. “Why, man, that’s what all Texas has been starving for for years! Didn’t I tell you? Haven’t I been telling you? Haven’t I been begging you to make a herd and drive north, somewhere, and trust to God to find buyers there, since there’s no hope here, south or east? Haven’t I told you, Jim?”

“I reckon you did, ma’am,” admitted her aid. “Same time, you didn’t know a damned thing about it.”

“Oh, you!” Taisie turned to him. “Do you expect to have people show you what’s in their hands before you draw cards? Can’t you take a chance?”

“For my own self, yes, Miss Taisie. For you—we all was scared. Especial we was scared when you said you was going along.”

“But I am going along! And I am going to put up a herd!”

“Now, Miss Lockhart,” ventured Dan McMasters, “you couldn’t do that. Your men can put up a herd and drive north for you, but no woman ever has gone north of the Red, or ever ought to try it. There’s no real trail—it’s all wild north of here for fifteen hundred miles or more. There’s not a bridge—I’ve swum ten rivers and forded a hundred. There are Indians. There are storms—and no shelter for you. Miss Lockhart, there’s not a man in Texas ever would let you go.”

“There’s not men enough in all Texas to keep me from going!”

Taisie’s grief was entirely forgotten now.

“Even your father——” Jim began.

“Don’t!” Sudden tears came to the girl’s eyes.

“She allus bogs down—about her father,” explained Nabours.

“I’ll not bog down! I’ll get over this some day. Why, the reason I want to go north is to find the man that did it! He’s somewhere up there.”

McMasters, captain in the Rangers, looked at her with a sudden kindling of his own cool eyes; but he said nothing. The mistress of Del Sol stamped her foot in its cross-banded slipper.

“Always you treat me like a girl. I’m not!”

“Yes, you are, Miss Taisie,” rejoined Jim Nabours. “You’re a girl, and I’m your mother and your father both, till you get a new segundo.”

“Listen at him!” Taisie turned to the young stranger. “The whole state of Texas is dying on its feet, and the men of Texas scared to drive, with maybe five dollars a head waiting for them at the railroad! That’s riches!

“How long would it take?” she demanded of her informant.

“All season, practically,” replied McMasters. “I rode about forty miles a day, coming south, and I was eleven hundred miles away at one time. Cows could go ten miles a day, maybe, if you could keep the herd going; say two-three hundred miles a month. Say three-four months—that would cover a heap of trail.”

“All the distance between here and heaven! All the difference between poverty and self-respect! Oh!”—she looked him fair in the face—“it’s no use to pretend! Do you know what I did this very morning, sir, just before you rode in? Do you know why I’m crying now? I can’t help it. Why, I was down there to tell my men that I’d turned them all loose this morning. I discharged them all. I told them I was broke, that I couldn’t pay my hands.

“Poor? Don’t I know! Go back to Gonzales and tell your people that the last Lockhart’s down in the dust. I’ve got no pride left at all, because I’m broke. Do you wonder that I cry?”

“She did!” said Jim Nabours. “She is!”

McMasters turned away and looked out the window. The tears of such a woman made one thing no man could face.

“But, of course,” added the foreman, “I taken all that in my own hands. I just sont the hands out like usual. Seems like I can hear the irons sizzling on about a dozen long ears by now already.”

“And the lot not worth a pinch of old Milly’s snuff!” commented Taisie. “The market—that’s the one thing! Mr. McMasters has brought news!”

“I almost hesitate over it,” said the young man. “I can’t bring it free of risk and danger.”

“You don’t know my men!” broke out Taisie proudly.

“Oh, yes, I do! I know us all, ma’am. They—we would all die first. But suppose that was not enough?”

“And if I’m a woman, at least I’m not an old woman. I’ll drive the first Texas herd to the railroad with my own men if it takes our last horse and last man! It’s north for me, or I’m gone. When you rode in, sir, I was at the lowest ebb of all my life.”

“I wish the tide may turn, Miss Lockhart,” said young Dan McMasters quietly.

“It will—I believe it has!” She was on her feet, her eyes bright, her color up. “Why, listen! I’ll take Anita and Milly both along. We’ve two carretas left. Jim, you old coward”—her hand was on his shoulder affectionately—“you know you told me you could make a herd of five thousand fours in our brand inside of a day’s ride from Del Sol. Even if it was beeves——

“Tell me, what ages?” She turned suddenly to McMasters.

“I can’t say yet,” was his reply. “Fours and long threes would do best for shipping East. But the talk I heard is that there’ll be use for stockers—even yearlings, too, because the range is open all in north and west of there. People are crowding out to the buffalo range, following the railroads. It’s unbelievable how crazy they are. It seems as though they felt they just have got to get West. They’ll all need cattle.”

A new expression came to his face as he went on:

“There’s millions of acres of unbroken land up there, north of the old slavery line of 36-30. It will take North and South both to make it. It will be the West! It will be the heart of America!”

“We’ll be the first to see it! There’s no age from calf to fifty years Del Sol can’t drive!” said Taisie Lockhart decisively. “How many?”

“That depends on your force of hands. Some said three thousand head was around what a herd should be. A dozen hands could drive it—say fifteen-twenty. Each man ought to have at least six or eight horses in his string. There’ll be riding.”

“Well, what of that? I can turn out twenty men who can talk to cows in their own language. We wouldn’t miss thirty-five hundred fours, Jim says. When shall we start?”

She still was smiling, eager; but the look in her eyes was one of resolution; and as Jim had said, a Lockhart never changed.

“Jesse Chisholm just followed the grass,” answered McMasters presently. “It’s green here in March, and it’s February now. Once across the Colorado and the Brazos, we’d go clean to the Red, easy—I know my father always said that. He said a driver could go in west of Austin and Fort Worth, and get to the north edge of Texas and be almost sure not to see an Indian. The Comanches are away west of that line. We’re about on the ninety-eighth meridian here, and near the thirtieth parallel. My father said that it was a new world north of thirty-six degrees north latitude. That land is all unmapped. No one lives there but the Indians.”

“She eats Comanches,” said Jim Nabours. “Little thing like them don’t bother her none. As for swimming a herd acrost a spring fresh, with quicksand on both sides, why, she don’t mind that none a-tall!”

An ominous silence and a heightened color did not impress him. At length his employer went on, addressing the visitor:

“Very well. Say fifteen men and a wrangler and a cook, with me and black Milly, my cook, and Anita, my Spanish woman. We’d take the two carretas, with oxen for them and the cook’s wagon. Sixteen riders by six or eight horses is a hundred or a hundred and fifty for the remuda—we’d do it easy.”

“Plumb easy!” came Jim’s solemn comment. “A thousand miles in a carreta without a spring, right over a crooked mesquite ex, is right simple. About one week and Milly’d die, her going three hundred net right now; and Anita’d die of homesickness for her jacal she’s used to living in.

“Besides, ma’am”—here the foreman’s voice changed—“I may as well talk plain. Not joking, we can’t live on beef straight. Three-four months of meal and beans and molasses for twenty men is more than we have got, though meal and beans and molasses and side meat we’d have to have, and coffee if we could. The hands work better for coffee, mornings, and after rains or hard rides.”

The color on poor Taisie’s cheeks grew deeper in humiliation. She spread out her hands.

“I’m broke! I’ve said that!”

There was silence for some time. At length the young sheriff of Gonzales spoke quietly.

“Miss Lockhart,” said he, “I don’t like to hear that word in Texas.”

“Truth is the simplest!”

“Yes, I know. But what one ranch in Texas doesn’t happen to have the neighbors do have—they always have had. Take in one or two neighbors with you for the drive—say a thousand head, each brand. They’d be glad to put up the wagon and the remuda. You must not push away your neighbors. This is Texas.”

A cold rage met his sincerity and friendliness.

“I’ll have help from no one! Del Sol will drive a lone herd north, win or lose. I’ll take it all back, Jim—you’re all hired on again, the last man of you. You’ll stand by me? I’ll sell my cows and pay my men; and then I’ll see if there’s any law in the North or any men in the South to help me find a murderer.”

“Ma’am,” said Jim Nabours, “you’ve put it now so’s’t not one of us can help hisself. We got to go. When hell freezes we’ll all walk out on the ice together.

“But you got to thank Mr. McMasters for what he’s done told us, Miss Taisie,” he added. “I reckon he’s our best neighbor.”

“I do thank you, sir!” The girl rose and held out her hand frankly. The young man bent over it. He did not seat himself again. “But you’ll stop a day or so with us?”

“No, I must be riding now,” he answered.

He found his hat, bowed, passed out the door with no dallying or indecision; nor said a word about return. He was abrupt to coldness, if not to rudeness.

Anastasie Lockhart looked through the window shades so intently that her hand remained not fallen after it had drawn them; so intently that she did not hear old Milly as she entered.

“Laws, Miss Taisie, is that young gemman gone? I done brung in some likker fer him. He’s quality, Miss Taisie! Who is he, an’ whah he come from? Is he done ask you about marryin’ yit?”

“Not yet, Milly,” answered Anastasie.

She sat down in the one rocking-chair, staring at the uncarpeted floor. She was older now than she had been an hour ago. Why had this neighbor not promised an early return? And was he not a strangely stiff and silent young man? Were the honors of sheriff and captain so much as to render him superior to a girl with red hair who wore her mother’s clothes, years old?

Anastasie Lockhart, astonishingly vital, astonishingly beautiful, rose to find a mirror so that she could read an answer. As she did so she recognized, standing at the end of the rawhide settee, where her visitor could not have failed to see the sudden disorder of its interior, the rawhide trunk which long had served alike as wardrobe and safety vault for her. Vexed at the revelation of her first untidiness in housekeeping, she bent now to close the heavy lid once more. Suddenly she went to her knees beside it, her eyes wet once more at what she saw of silk and lace gone to bits. She caught up the fragments to her cheeks.

A daguerreotype in its disintegrating frame lay to her hand. She opened it. Her mother. Yes, she had been beautiful. And this frame was the twin of it—her father. She turned it to catch the light so that the likeness would show. A bold, bearded face, aquiline, high. She sighed as she looked at the picture of a man cut down by an assassin in the full of his strength and resolution.

Below these things and others lay to half the depth of the old chest a mass of papers, all similar. Contemptuously she thrust in her hands, her arms, to the elbows.

“Scrip!” she murmured to herself. “Scrip for more Texas land, to raise more Texas cows! He was mad about it—scrip, scrip was all he thought! I only hope that he did not see it!” She meant Dan McMasters. “But of course he did—he couldn’t help it, where he sat.

“Well, it’s no matter,” she added mentally. “He’s not coming back again. If I’d known how cold he was I’d not have troubled!”

She spread out her long brown hands over her mother’s frock as, still kneeling, she sat back on her heels, in her mother’s cross-banded shoes.

CHAPTER IV
THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL

THE sun-drenched landscape of the Southwest lay warm, indolent, full of somber fire. The home buildings rested in the arm of a great live-oak grove, opposite whose opening appeared a wide land of rolling contours, now almost in the thin green of coming spring. Six miles away the tree lines showed a stream, and beyond that, as most folk knew, lay the great lake which originally had led Burleson Lockhart to take up this range. This side and that ran miles of mesquite, stretching south, tall cactuses showing betimes among the twisted thorny trees.

It was a little-known corner of America, in what one day was to be known as the great breeding range, last of the holdings above the Rio Grande to fall from the lax hand of Spain. The lack of rain left the vegetation anguished. A thousand distorted souls in torment lived in these gray trees. Soon the direct sun rays would again be searing into brown the new and tender grass, though it scarce had had its one annual chance to gasp in green.

A lizard scuttled across the dust of the dooryard. A road-runner sped along the fence of poles and rawhide, bent on its own mission. War was marked in every sign and token of Texas from its very first. No manner of pest and curse ever lacked in its cynically indifferent confines. Starvation, thirst, filled these mud-thickened bayous every year with hundreds of dead horses. The bones of cattle lay uncounted for a thousand miles, each dried hide and rack of whitening bones enriching soil that had no answer to its own fecundity in animal life. To live, to breed and to die—that was all that animal life there could do. Nothing to the dead creature that it had never known the shambles. The rack of bones was good enough for Spain.

But now had come Saxon men. Texas, savage, abounding, multiplying undisturbed, was now for the first time seeking outlet for her superabundant life, which for fifty years had increased undisturbed. Texas owned millions of worthless cattle; how many, no owner knew, nor could any man tell how far his cows ranged. He did not care. Unbranded cattle still ran in thousands. No one hunted strays, and the increase of strays belonged without reservation to the land that fed them. There was no cattle association, no general rodeo; and the home gatherings never claimed to be complete. Title, whether in land or cattle, was much a matter of indifference.

Of law there was little. A vast and unknown empire was controlled by a rude baronry whose like the world has never seen; who later were vastly to extend that empire and its ways.

These men set up the one great law of custom. The custom of the range was based on the natural habits of the cattle and the natural peculiarities of the grazing lands. The accepted brand, the right of the finder to an unowned range or water front, the tendency of cattle to cling to home, the law of natural probability in all things—such were rigid natural laws which no man might ignore with safety. As animal life ran wild, so also did human life, one no more restrained than the other. Only the saving grace of the Saxon instinct for some sort of law brought Texas, literally born in the wilderness, up to what she is to-day.

There was no market. At least, rambling and unconcerted attempts had found none till now. After the Civil War a seething unrest passed over all Texas. The demand for some sort of market was first in the thought of all men who owned nothing but cows and reasoned only in terms of cows.

“She’s going to drive!” said Jim Nabours to his new-found friend as they crossed the Del Sol dooryard. “That’s her pap’s old idee. What you’ve said cinches it!”

“Yes? When can you begin the herd?”

The old cowman’s face clouded.

“Listen here! Keep what I tell you. That girl knows a lot about cows, but a heap of things about her own cows she don’t know. She knows how many her father had and she thinks she’s got more. She hain’t.”

“Combed?”

“Yes, combed! We’re too close to Austin! Hide hunters and calf hunters and plain thieves and politics—that’s since the war. The damn Yankees are trying to run a country they don’t know nothing about. All Central Texas has took to hunting cows. This here’s a good place for thieves—or for men who can see ahead a little ways.

“We didn’t know it till just now, but there must of been a band of skinners and slick hunters working our range all last winter and winter afore. She ain’t got one cow now where she thinks she’s got fifty. What could we do? We didn’t know, and don’t know, who done it; but we didn’t durst to let her really know it was did. Now, she’s going to find out.”

“But surely you can make up a mixed herd anyhow!”

“Oh, yes, maybe. But if we do hit a market, where’ll we round up the next herd for her? Some one else has got our cows. There’s a big steal been going on in Central Texas.

“You see, we done our damnedest to take care of her and not let her know. God ha’ mercy on me! I’m the worstest perjured liar in Texas, and that’s a big claim. We’ve had a rodeo now and then, here at the home place, but she didn’t know how fur we driv some of them cows!

“But how could we fool her if we put up a big herd? She kin read a brand as well as us. We’d road brand, I reckon—yes; but that wouldn’t change the facts none. She’d ketch on. She ain’t no fool, that girl. What do you say, then?”

“Why, I say start your round-up to-morrow! Keep in the T. L., the Del Sol brand, or do the best you can. It will come to a show-down anyhow before long, so why wait? Let hers be the first herd north of the Red this spring. While the others are thinking it over, let’s be up the trail! Believe me, all Texas will be moving north before long!”

“She pops!” said Jim Nabours suddenly. He had decided.

“How long to make the herd?” McMasters also kindled.

“Two weeks. We could brand out within another two, only we’ll have to rope and throw. Our pens won’t hold. We got no chute.”

“Build one to-day. It will pay you.”

Nabours looked at the newcomer curiously with an eye not free of suspicion.

“You taken a mighty interest.” He spoke slowly.

“I have! I want to go up the trail with you-all. I’ve reason for going north again. My business there wasn’t settled.”

“But what’s your reasons for being so brash about coming in with us? I dunno’s I’ve give you leave, and I know the boss didn’t.”

“Two reasons. One I’ve told you—the business that took me north and brought me south will take me north again. Never mind what that is. I’m a captain of Rangers, and we can’t talk. The other reason you can guess.”

“I reckon I do guess.”

“Muy bien! Our families both came in with Stephen Austin. They both had men massacred with Fannin at Goliad. They both had men in the Alamo. Her father and mine were both killed up the trail. Do you think any McMasters would let any Lockhart starve? Listen! You say she’s poor; say her range is skinned. Tell her nothing—but please let a McMasters help a Lockhart. Let me send you fifty horses and two wagonloads of grub. You needn’t let her know. Make it a loan or gift, either way you please. And let me ride with you.”

A surprising irrelevancy marked Jim Nabours’ next remark.

“That girl can marry twenty-seven men to-morrow morning. She ain’t going to marry no one until she knows who killed Burleson Lockhart. ‘Bring me the man that finds my father’s murderer,’ says she, ‘and I believe I’d marry him.’ ”

“She said that?”

“Si, señor. Maybe meant it, or thought she did. You can’t tell much about no woman, and least of all about Burleson Lockhart’s daughter. One thing, she’ll be slow to quit anything she starts. She’s sot now on driving. I reckon she will.”

By now they had approached the cook house and the corral. McMasters had his bridle from the saddle that straddled the pole near the bunk-house door. Soon he had his horse under saddle. His pistol belt was now in place again.

The foreman looked at it curiously as the two walked toward the rawhide gate. Nabours pushed it open. As he did so a warning rattle sounded almost underfoot. He sprang back with an oath. With the word came a shot, not from his own weapon. The brown body of the serpent was flung writhing, headless. McMasters’ pistol was back at its belt when Nabours turned.

“Who done that?” he demanded.

“I did,” said McMasters. “You’d have stepped on him.”

“Well, if I want to step on a rattler, that’s my business, ain’t it? Maybe I like to step on them. You shooting made me jump. Still, quick work, huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you a good shot?”

“I was elected sheriff of Gonzales. I am a captain in the Texas Rangers.”

His face was grave as he spoke, sad rather than boastful.

“What’s that?” suddenly exclaimed Jim Nabours. “Listen!”

The sound of hoofs had come suddenly from around the bend of the trail that wound through the mesquite thicket screening the gate; hoofs of more than one animal, not coming but going.

“Wait!”

The sound of the young man’s voice deterred Nabours as much as his hand. He stood, absorbed, frowning, listening to the receding hoof beats. The rhythm told him the horses had riders. At last he beckoned to Nabours. The two set out down the trail.

“Look here!” said Dan McMasters at length as they rounded the bend.

At a clump of huisache the tracks of six horses could be seen making a trampled spot back of the bushes. It all was plainly visible to eyes experienced as these.

“They was tied!” said Jim Nabours.

McMasters nodded, bending over the bruised stems which the reins had covered.

“They must have closed up a lot last night,” said Dan McMasters cryptically, as though to himself. “They couldn’t have been far off this morning.

“Thank you, Mr. Rattler!” He smiled grimly as he kicked at a crooked stick for substitute of the dead snake. “You served me a good turn!”

CHAPTER V
MARRIAGE, COWS AND CARPETBAGS

THE foreman of Del Sol stood, hands in pockets, for some time, looking down the trace whither the late visitor had disappeared. His head was dropped forward, as one in studious distrust of his own judgment; a frown yet more wrinkled his forehead. At length he turned and found his way, not to the corrals, but to the house.

Blancocito still stood dozing in the sun. The mistress of Del Sol was not riding this morning. Jim knocked at the front door.

“Come!”

He entered. Taisie was sitting at the end of the rawhide settee, still in her bravest finery. Her hands lay in her lap; her eyes were somber, clouded; doubt, distrust appeared her portion also.

She had looked about her with appraising eye; had reflected also. All about, in every token, she saw evidences of lapse, of retrogression, of decay, indeed of poverty rapidly running to seed. The lack of a strong hand was not to be denied. Moreover, the conditions of this property were reflected all over a state, where not even the strongest hand or the clearest mind had been able to achieve solution. It was the hour of travail for a great, unknown, forgotten country. Taisie Lockhart might have known that the travail of a country is only the multiple of many individual pains.

She looked now at her faithful henchman, silent for a time.

“Now, ma’am——”

“Yes, Jim?”

Nabours dropped into a chair, gripping the legs with twining spurred feet.

“I was going to ast you how you liked this Gonzales man, ma’am. He’s went now.”

“Were you taking a shot at him for luck, Jim? I heard a shot.” She tried to smile.

“No’m. It was him. A rattler was by the gate. He shot its head off. I must say he done it quick and easy too.”

“Well, he can ride.”

“Uh-huh—and shoot. Yes, I reckon. Fact is, he’s got a reputation now, for a young man. He’s the youngest sher’f in Texas, like enough. He’s only in six months, and in that time his county has done shrunk more’n a thousand population. He ain’t killed that many, ma’am—no; but he has done killed four or five, and them bad. Then when the Rangers was pulled together again and him put in as a captain, a good many of them people taken the hint and moved. It was time. Down there and in Uvalde there was plenty of men that didn’t own a head or a acre, who’d agree to put you up a herd of five thousand head on a month’s notice.

“I tell you, ma’am, the times is bad. The cow business in this state is in one hell of a fix. . . . Well, it takes good shooting to be a sher’f, let alone a Ranger.”

“Four? Four men? He killed them?” A sort of horror was in her voice, her eyes.

“In duty, ma’am. It don’t hardly count.”

“He did not look—like that!”

“Huh! He didn’t? Well, I’d say he did! When he put on his guns they was two, and he wore his right-hand gun pointing back and his left-hand one pointing forward. I never seen no man do that before. If that don’t look perfessional killer I ain’t no jedge. Now, which gun he done use to kill the rattler I never could tell.

“He makes me study, ma’am. His eye is cold as ice. He don’t talk and he don’t laugh. He’s got something on his mind. Somehow——”

“You’d trust him, Jim?”

“Ef he was on my side. But how in hell can you tell by looking at him whose side he is on?”

“Four men! Yes”—her voice trailed off—“I thought he was—well, cold. He never did—start.”

“No; and most does, Miss Taisie. And you that was dressed up your best for him; and him a stranger you hadn’t saw sence he was a boy, and hadn’t spoke to now till he come in and seen you. And he didn’t start!

“Miss Taisie, I’ve set in some games, but I can’t read that feller’s game. He’s friendly, but he’s so damned mysterious I can’t get no line on him.”

“What brought him here, Jim?”

“You, Miss Taisie! You bring ’em all here. Trouble is, all that comes is dead broke; no more’n a saddle and a pair of spurs to their name. But the McMasters family ain’t broke.

“Now, one thing is shore, Miss Taisie: This here can’t go on forever. I ain’t no good at advice to womenfolks; all I can advise is cows and caballos. But it looks plain to me that before long, you being a orphant, you got to be married to some kind of a man. Peaceable ef we can, by force ef we must, it looks plain to me, which am both yore paw and maw, Miss Taisie, we got to get you-all married. It can’t no ways run on this way much furder’n what it has.”

A dimple came in each of Anastasie Lockhart’s brown cheeks.

“Well, Jim?”

“But not to this man, no matter what he do, Miss Taisie! Not till I can clean up my own mind. I’m oncertain on him somehow. Friends and neighbors he ought to be—shore he ought. But Calvin McMasters, his dad, was agin slavery and secession, and your paw was with the South he was raised in. Them two was friends. I wouldn’t call the McMasterses damn Yankees. But I can’t place him yet.

“Now, how about Del Williams? You know he’s been waiting and hoping. He went to the war because you wouldn’t. He hung on with old Kirby Smith to the last, wondering ef you would. He’s come back after the surrender, hoping you would. He’s a good honest boy, that wears one gun one way and saves his money, when he gets any. He’s a good segundo and he knows cows.”

“Is that all I may ask?”

The girl’s voice was almost wistful. True, she was of the border. But she had seen the wider world. There were books on shelves in that very room. The portraits of her father and her mother were faces of aristocrats. Their lives had been those of adventurers. To know cows? Was that all the husband of the daughter of these two needed to possess?

“Miss Taisie, cows is all we got—and we ain’t got them.”

“I know it, Jim. I told you this morning, I’m broke. I was going to sell out, move out. I was going to try to teach school, or something, over East somewhere. Jim, it’s awful to be poor.”

“It’s awfuler when you ain’t been always, Miss Taisie.”

“But I’ll not be, now! We’re going to drive!”

“You say so, ma’am. It sounds so easy!”

“Why can’t we? Tell me? Haven’t I got cow hands working for me? Haven’t I got fifty thousand cows in the T. L.? You say sixty-five thousand. Isn’t the world full of grass and water north of here? Didn’t you hear what he told you—hasn’t my father told you—that there’s a whole other world waiting up north, not a man nor a cow nor a horse in it, hardly; just waiting? Jim, the time to make money is when times are bad. If we haven’t got cash we’ve got sand. This may be a time of despair or a time of opportunity. It’s always been that way, all over the world. When some despair others win—if they’ve sand to do it.”

“You talk like a book I read oncet, ma’am. It was full of maximuns.”

Taisie stamped her foot.

“We’ll put up a herd and trail it! I’ll go along! We’ll be utterly broke—or else we’ll win!”

“You can’t go along, Miss Taisie. No woman could.”

“But I will!”

“You make things right hard for yore segundo, Miss Taisie.”

“Jim! Jim! Don’t talk that way! Don’t you think I know? Isn’t all this hard for me too? But if we have luck I’ll make it easier for you-all.”

“You’re just a girl, Miss Taisie. Let’s get married first, huh? I don’t mean me. How about you and Del?”

The girl rose, a native imperiousness in her gesture.

“Leave those things to me!”

“Oh, all right, all right,” sighed Nabours. “But maybe you’ll leave some things to me?”

“What?”

The old range man rose and spread his hands.

“Miss Taisie,” said he, “fire me! I’m the damnedest liar in Texas!”

“What do you mean, Jim?”

“I am. I been lying to you. You ain’t got no cows left, hardly. Our range has been combed and skinned; for two years it’s been going on—I don’t know how long before. You ain’t got no sixty-five nor fifty thousand cows. You’re lucky if you can put up a herd of four thousand. We’ve all lied to you. We couldn’t tell you the truth. Ma’am, this outfit would all lay down and die for you. They’d do almost anything but tell you the truth. We couldn’t do that. We didn’t have the nerve.”

The girl sank back, her face pale.

“Why, Jim! I didn’t really know!”

“No, ma’am. Some gang’s at work in here, and north and west of here—far north as Palo Pinto. We’ve been away, enduring the war and after the war. We’re all broke, us Texans. But in Austin is plenty people ain’t broke none a-tall. We don’t know nothing, can’t prove nothing. All I say is, in Austin is plenty people ain’t broke a-tall.”

“You mean the Yankee treasurer?”

“I don’t say out loud what I do mean. All I know is, our range is skinned; and I know we’re up against a strong game. That’s why, ma’am, looking for the best of Del Sol and what yore paw meant for her, and looking for yore own good interests, too, I been advising you to get married. That’d simple up a lot of things.

“You see, then we could settle down and raise cows. We could build up the range again. They ain’t going to be so brash about things when they know they’s a real man in charge of Del Sol. But a orphant is easy picking for a man like Rudabaugh and his gang of carpetbagging thieves.”

“You mean Rudabaugh?”

“I shore do. In Austin, we don’t know what’s going on. In office and out, there’s a new gang in there. They’re organized fer to steal this here whole state, lock, stock and barrel. They don’t stop at nothing. They allow the war ain’t never done; that us Texans ain’t never surrendered; that Lee’s still a enemy; and that all this state is fair picking fer men that wasn’t never borned nor raised in Texas, orphants and all. They got wide idees, yes. But they ain’t idees that was borned in Texas, ma’am.”

“And are we helpless, Jim?”

“Damn nigh it, ma’am.”

“But surely we could raise two or three thousand head, of some sort, to drive north this spring. Leave them the empty house, Jim! Leave them the Del Sol round pen without a horse in it! Leave them our range—empty! But by the Lord——”

She smote fist in palm, walked. Her foreman’s fighting blood kindled at the flame of the old courage that had brought families into this wilderness.

“Yes, by the Lord! Taisie, child, ef ever we do get on our feet, us Texans, we’ll line up against them people and we’ll see it through!”

“Then we’ll drive, Jim?”

“Yes, we’ll drive! Ef it takes the last hoof, we’ll drive this spring, come grass. I don’t know nothing about the country; I never driv a herd so fur, and no one else never has. But ef you’ll let us do our very best, we’ll bust north inside of thirty days!”

He caught both her long brown hands in his own gnarled and crooked ones, his stubbled face grave, his gray eyes troubled; a figure not impressive in his broken boots, his torn checked trousers, but with a sincerity proved these years since his boyhood under this girl’s father.

“You’ll take it fair, child, ef we do the best we can fer you! You’ll never holler?”

“You know I never will, Jim. And you know I’ll go along and I’ll go through.”

“Lord help you, Miss Taisie! And Lord help us too! There’s been times when my job seemed a heap easier than what it does right now!”

Author’s Note.—There is no Gregg, no Parkman, no Chittenden for the lost and forgotten cattle trail. Although almost as important as the east-and-west railroads in the early development of the trans-Missouri, it has no map, no monument, no history, almost no formulated condition. There is a comprehensive literature covering our westbound expansion, but of the great north-and-south pastoral road almost the contrary must be said, such is the paucity of titles.

The classic of the cattle trade of the West is a crude book, now rare, by Joseph G. McCoy, called Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest. It is upon this book that the author has rested most largely in endeavoring to restore the feel of the early cattle drives. It was printed in 1874.

Within the past two years Mr. George W. Saunders, of San Antonio, Texas, has printed a book, The Trail Drivers of Texas, containing brief life stories from the pens of more than a hundred men who trailed cattle before and after the railroad days. These sketches are human documents. The author wishes to acknowledge obligations to this work, which he has used almost literally in many passages for the sake of known accuracy.

The books of Andy Adams—The Log of a Cowboy; Wayne Anthony, Cow Man; Wells Brothers; A Texas Matchmaker; The Outlet—make the most authentic fiction or quasi fiction of the trail days. Mr. Adams made trips on northern drives, his experience beginning in 1882. His books are storehouses of later trail data. The author makes acknowledgment to that source of information. Records of army exploration also have been useful.

The quasi biography of Chas. A. Siringo, A Lone Star Cowboy, is still another, and very useful record of life in the early Southwest. It abounds in facts as well as in thrilling incidents. The author can personally testify to its accuracy in many details of the bloody history of New Mexico. Mr. Siringo’s boyhood dates back into the Texas that existed before the northern trails began.

The author himself went to the Southwest in 1881; has lived and traveled in the West all his life; and has followed or crossed the old cattle trail at perhaps fifty points between the Gulf and Northern boundary lines. The term of years thus indicated covers many changes. The future will bring yet swifter change. As to the great pastoral days of the West, it is high time for a fiction that may claim to be faithful and reverent.

Fiction cannot be exact, else it would be history and not fiction. That it should fairly reflect the spirit of its chosen day goes without saying. To lurid writers who never could have known the West, the author has found himself unable to contract any debt, but would make full acknowledgment to all who have aided from a wider information or experience.

CHAPTER VI
THE LONE HERD

“AND I’ll bet this is the sorriest herd of cows that ever was made on the soil of Texas!” There was grief in the tones of old Jim Nabours as he turned away from the dusty flat where the circling riders were holding the main body of the T. L. gathering. For many days the men had been riding mesquite thicket, timbered flat and open glade, sweeping in the cattle in a general rodeo for the making of the trail herd. This was the result.

“About one in ten of what we’d orto of had, and what she still thinks she’s got,” he added, speaking to his own trail segundo, bearded young Del Williams, as they pulled up and looked back at the cattle.

Williams nodded.

“It’s been a system,” said he. “Some one’s stripped the whole upper range. We’d orto had fifty riders instead of ten—and not a Mexican in the lot—to ride the upper water fronts. I got my own suspicions.”

“And me. But what’s the use? The war come and we couldn’t help it. But even if cows wasn’t worth a damn we ought to of knew how many we didn’t have. Till now, I never really did.”

Williams nodded. A tall, well-favored youth he was, with the gravity of the returned soldier. He still, fault of better, wore the Confederate gray. His garb was worn and patched, like that of the foreman.

“They robbed that range after the old man was killed and afore we-all got here in charge. For over two years Del Sol was let plumb alone. Laguna del Sol! Best range in Texas, and the onliest place in all Texas that ain’t boiling over with cows right now! Fours? Long threes? Beeves? How could we pick? We was lucky to get what we did, even with quite some few that don’t show T. L. any too damned plain.

“Oh, there’s over four thousand head,” Williams went on; “four thousand three hundred and forty-two is what we made it when we tallied ’em in. But sufferin’ snakes!”

“Uh-huh. There’s steers there that looks like old Colonel Cortés in the face—bet there’s a thousand head that dates back beyond the Spanish Conquest. There’s yearlings here is ten years old, and the rest perportionate. Spring calves and fours and threes and laws knows what—that’s one fine outfit to drive a thousand miles, huh?”

“Well,” said Williams soberly, “we got to tell the boss we just made it mixed, so’s’t she could suit every buyer. And damned if I don’t think she could—unless’n a buyer wanted a even lot of good fours for beeves.”

“Of course,” assented Nabours. “If only she wasn’t so hard to fool and so sot in her ways!

“Is the new chute ready?” he asked, settling back into the saddle as he uncoiled a leg from around the horn. “We’ve got to get ’em in the road brand.”

“The boys got the wings done this morning,” replied Williams. “It won’t take forever to put our Fishhook road brand over the T. L. But I’ll bet a horse there’s mossy horns in there’ll brand as hard as a tarrypin, and calves that’ll take two to hold the brand.”

In a lesser flat, a couple of miles from the home corrals, new corrals and a branding chute had hurriedly been put up by the T. L. hands for the quicker process of working the trail herd. The material was mesquite posts set deep, with cross poles lashed on with hide. A nail was a thing unknown. The two men rode along the fenced lines approvingly.

“The sher’f’s a cow hand, all right,” said Nabours. “Just how he finds time to quit the sher’f’s office is what he ain’t explained, no more’n a lot of other things. But cows he does know. He’s coming in now.”

The rider who approached them from the farther side of the flat was not easily recognizable as the same young man who had ridden alone into the Del Sol gate a fortnight or more ago. His garb now was the loose wool of the average cattle hand of the place and day, his checkerboard trousers thrust into his bootlegs. Chaparajos he did not now wear, nor did any Saxon Texans when they could avoid it. There was at that time no standardized cowboy, nor any uniform for him. Indeed, the very name of “cowboy” was unknown on the lower range. The Del Sol ranch hands were for the most part sons of neighboring ranches, most of them lank, whiskered, taciturn young men, and for the most part seedy of apparel. They came in what garb they were able to get, and they utterly lacked uniformity, beyond the fact that each could ride, rope and brand, and all were able to live on food that would have killed men less hardy.

One of such company might have been Dan McMasters now as he plodded forward, mounted on a stout grulla of his own string—a blue-crane horse such as would sometimes be seen in any large remuda. He had appeared at Del Sol a week earlier than he had promised, but had forbidden the men to announce him at the house. He had lived with the cattle hands, and wished his presence to be unknown, he said, until after the herd was on its way. All for reasons which he did not declare.

He was taciturn and mysterious as ever to Jim Nabours, and the latter also grew chary of speech. Low as his own resources were, it did not wholly please him that, stacked up in two newly arrived trail wagons near the home corral, were supplies enough to run the outfit through to Abilene. It pleased him no more that if the Del Sol remuda now carried under its own road brand another brand, that brand should be the McMasters Circle Arrow, which was ranged in Gonzales County, far below. Del Sol had never borrowed, never been obliged.

“Amigos! Caballeros!” McMasters waved a hand as he drew near.

Del Williams looked at him in silence, nor was Nabours at first much more communicative.

“Well,” he said at length, “that there bunch of cows is what we call our trail herd. I expect they’d all hold still and let us brand ’em standing. The boss don’t suspect nothing but what this here herd is all select fours. Well, let her think so. Grass is up strong here, and we’ll not ketch it as we move north. So let’s push this here Noah’s-ark outfit into the pens and get it in the Fishhook soon’s the Lord’ll let us!”

“Well, we’ve all done our best,” commented McMasters.

Nabours looked at him dourly.

“Ef we wasn’t broke,” said he, “you couldn’t of done as much as I’ve let you. Anyhow I didn’t take all the beans and molasses you sont up—there’s half in your wagon yet, and I want you to send it back home. Besides, I won’t take no wagon from you; we got our own carts, and them’s good enough. Horses, now—why, yes, I’ll take the loan of them, fer maybe you can sell ’em north. I don’t want to hit Aberlene with a bunch of sore backs. Ef you got some horses, anywheres, why, there you are; but ef you’ve et up all the chuck, why, where are you? We maybe couldn’t never pay that back—I don’t know. So you jest send you own wagon back home while you got it.”

“Well, all right,” replied McMasters, slightly changing color. “You know, of course, I’m not pushing anything on you. I don’t want your employer to know anything about it. And I know you-all have done your best.”

“Yes, I reckon we have. We’re not hardly leaving a hen wrangler at Del Sol—taking the whole force and family and most of the furniture, down to Miss Taisie’s trunk. Buck Talley, our Senegambian chief, he’d of died if he hadn’t got to go on as cook. Milly can drive one carreta, and old Anita don’t know nothing better’n to set on the seat of a carreta and talk Spanish to them oxens. Ef we don’t make Aberlene it’s because there ain’t no Aberlene. Here we come, forty-five hundred cows, ef ye don’t mind calling ’em that, sixteen more or less human cow hands, nineteen kinds of rifles and six-shooters, a hundred and fifteen saddle ponies and the only red-headedest boss in all Texas, which is a girl. God bless our home!

“Speaking of hair, did either of you-all ever notice Miss Taisie’s sort of hair?” he demanded, suddenly turning.

McMasters made no comment. Del Williams only looked at Nabours.

“Well, you see, her hair is plumb long and plumb straight, except at the far end it curls up, like a drake’s tail. You see that? You know what that means? Well, any woman that has hair like that can practice magic. I read that in a dream book oncet. Them sort is witches, and it’s no manner of use trying to stop ’em. That’s what the book said. Living along twenty-two year with Miss Taisie, taking out three I spent in the war, I’m here to say the book didn’t tell no lie. So here we all are, sixteen fools that can’t no ways help theirselves, all along of the boss having that kind of red hair that curls up on the end. Well, like you say, we all done our best. I can’t look fifty horses and two wagons of grub in the mouth—not yet.

“Del, ride back and tell the boys to throw the herd all closter to the road chute. Let’s get as many as we can in the iron before she gets too dark to work. We’ll put half at roping and branding on the flat and the balance can work ’em through the chute.”

The three turned toward the dust cloud where the main herd was held by the men. A rider was coming out, top speed.

“Hello!” began Nabours. “What’s a-eating him?”

The horseman drew up his mount squatting, throwing up a hand—old Sanchez, all his life a Del Sol rider, and the only Mexican allowed to go with the trail herd.

“Pronto, Señor Jeem!” he called. “Los hombres—baja!” He pointed to the herd.

“What hombres, Sanchez? What’s up?”

“Los hombres—they cutta our herd!”

“Cut our herd—what’s that?”

“Read-a our brand—cutta our herd. They say-a we gotta their vacas. They goin’ take!”

“Cut our herd? On our own ground. Not none! The man don’t live that’s going to cut a Del Sol herd without my consent and my help. Come on!”

He set spurs, rode through the thin fringe of mesquite that made the shortest path.

“Come on, McMasters!” he called across his shoulder. “I want you for witness here!”

But as he and his two riders burst free and spurred down the slope to where the great herd was made he looked back, not hearing hoof beats. McMasters was not with them.

“I’ll be damned!”

Nabours smothered the remainder of a volley of hot-headed oaths. He did not understand a man who sidestepped when he was needed.

CHAPTER VII
THE HERD CUTTERS

NABOURS, Del Williams and old Sanchez spurred down the saucerlike flat in which the Del Sol herd was held. They arrived none too soon.

A party of six strangers, all armed, were engaged in argument with as many of the Del Sol men, who had ridden between them and the edge of the herd. The plunging of the horses and the loud voices began to make the wild cattle uneasy. Other riders were doing all they could to hold the herd from a run, which might have been precisely what the intruders desired. Their leader, a heavy-set, dark-bearded, handsomely dressed man, spurred out to meet Nabours, who came straight in and with no ceremony jerked his mount almost against him.

“Who are you, and what do you want here?” he demanded angrily. The stranger coolly turned.

“Since you ride up and ask,” rejoined he, “we’re cowmen, and we want our property.”

“You’re no cowman!” hotly retorted the old foreman. “Else you wouldn’t be hollering and riding around the aidge of another man’s herd. What you trying to do—start our cattle back in the brush again? Your property be damned! Get on away from the aidge of our herd while you got time!”

The numbers of the Del Sol riders, thus increased and led by a determined man, impressed the brusque stranger; but he did not lack assurance.

“You buck the law, friend?” said he. “I’ve got certified records of eight brands, and powers of attorney from the owners to comb any herd going off this range. We’re taking no chances.”

“You’re taking damned long chances if you keep one more minute where you’re at,” remarked Jim Nabours. “Git back now, if you want to talk this over!”

He spurred between the strangers and the herd, threw the weight of his horse against the nearest rider, his eye never leaving the leader’s eye, and his hand always ready. His men followed him, pushing straight into the others. Any second a half dozen men might have been killed.

“Come on, boys!” called the bearded leader suddenly. “Pull off till I tell this fellow what’s what.”

They reined off, confused, a hundred yards or so one side; but Nabours clung against his man, knee to knee.

“You can’t tell us nothing!” said he. “You can’t cut a critter out of this herd! You can’t look at ary brand we got! You savvy?”

“I savvy you’re running a right high blaze, neighbor. You reckon you’re above the law?”

“Damn the law! The law ain’t got in here yet. Ef it had, our range wouldn’t of been skinned by a lot of lowdown thieves that wasn’t above robbing a girl when her own men was away. I’ve knowed all this year that our range was skinned. What cows we got we need. We’re a-going to trail ’em all north, jest like they lay, and no outfit’s going to cut that herd, law or no law. ’Tain’t no cow thieves is going to work over a brand in our herd, or even look at one.”

“You can’t hang that on me! Cow thieves?”

“I do hang it on you, and it goes! You look like a cow thief to me, and act like one. You come from Austin, but you never was raised in Texas. Pull out or we’ll work you over, and do it the old way!”

The two bands, about equal in numbers—for the bulk of the Del Sol men dared not leave the held herd—now faced each other, roughly divided by a line constantly changing as the horses shifted and plunged. Every man was armed. The insult had been passed. The smile on Nabours’ lined face, showing his snarling white teeth, the scowl on the face of the other partisan meant now only maneuvering for the first break. None of the stern-faced group thought of anything else. Eye watched hand. Revolvers lay itching and corded nerves were taut above them. Each man waited for the break.

The thunder of hoofs coming down the slope at their rear made a new factor. Jim Nabours dared not lift an eye to see who or what it was. He had to watch the other man’s eye, his hand. But the voice of old Sanchez rose, calling to the newcomers.

“Pronto, capitan! Vien aqui, pronto! Pronto!”

The intruders whirled, not daring to begin an encounter with new assailants at their rear. The crisis was broken.

Now Nabours saw five men, splendidly armed and mounted, who swept on, spurring. They wore the riding-garb of the newly reorganized Texas Rangers, that strange constabulary of the border soon to make more history of their own. A beardless boy, apparently their lieutenant, led them now.

“Hands up, you men!” commanded he.

The five men were halted in line, their perfectly broken mounts steady. A repeating carbine of the new Spencer type was in the hands of each, and each of the five had a man covered, his rifle leveled from his own waist.

“Sanchez, throw their guns on the ground!” ordered Nabours suddenly. The young lieutenant nodded.

“Don’t move, any of you, or we’ll have to shoot.”

Quietly he sat his motionless horse while the old Mexican, dismounting, walked to each saddle of the herd cutters and, drawing out each rifle, threw it and the man’s pistols in a heap on the ground.

“What does this mean?” demanded the burly leader of the invaders, still blustering. “We’re here peaceable. We’ve broke no law. We’re only after our own property that these men are about to drive out of the country.”

“Back to Austin!” replied the armed youth tersely. “If there’s a court left worth the name I’m going to get justice for you some time, Mr. Rudabaugh.”

“What on earth do you mean by that?” rejoined the ruffian. “We got papers to take up cows in these brands. Looky here. Don’t you never think you can hold up a state officer of Texas! I’ll have you damned rangers disbanded!”

“All right,” replied the youngster. “We ain’t disbanded yet.”

“But look here!”

The leader produced from the long tin case at his cantle a series of papers purporting to be brand descriptions and authorizations. The impassive young lieutenant shuffled them through, his rifle across his saddle.

“Yes?” said he. “Brands? What brands? Gonzales County? How old is the Six Slash E in Gonzales?”

“Twelve years,” asserted the chief of the interlopers.

“You’re a liar, Mister Treasurer,” smiled the boy. “There isn’t and never was any such brand in Gonzales. I think your names are forged. What are you doing in here, so far south?”

The partisan showed a sudden perturbation in his eyes.

“Well, who are you?” he demanded. “You seem to know mighty much for a upstart. I tell you, I’ll have you and your robbers all disbanded!”

“Never mind! I just happened to meet up with these other boys. You ride along as far as Austin and rest your hat there a while. We’ll see what the court says, if there are any courts now. You’ve worked this range long enough and close enough.”

The youth never lost his calm.

“You’ll wish you’d never pulled this sort of play with me!” flared Rudabaugh. “I’ve got friends——”

“Yes, the state treasurer does have friends. Don’t you steal enough that way, in your river-improvement ring and your other deals, without coming away south to rob a girl? What grudge you got against her or against her family? I wouldn’t let you cut that herd if I knowed it was full of brands besides the T. L.”

“You’re getting out of your depth now, young fellow,” sneered Rudabaugh. “What’s more, this is Caldwell and not Gonzales. You got no right to arrest anybody here.”

“As a state Ranger I shore have. I’m nastier to run on than any carpetbag sheriff that tallies in at Austin.

“Take them in, boys,” he concluded. “Work the old ley fuga if they break—but they’re damned cowards and will go quiet. Just make them ride in front.

“That’s the horse!” he added to one of his men as he rode apart and looked down on the dusty ground. “Shoe off, right front, and hoof split. They was plumb up to the gate of Del Sol.”

“Yes, and we’ll get our cows yet,” exclaimed Rudabaugh savagely, as a ranger nodded to old Sanchez, who now deftly bound each man’s feet together under his horse’s belly with a Spanish knot that bid fair to stay set.

“So?” The young rider’s smile was pleasant. “Now, how’d you all like to have back your guns and an even break, you to begin right now to cut that Del Sol herd?”

“I know there’s cows in that herd that ain’t in the T. L. Brand.”

“Well, they’ll all be in our road brand before sundown two days,” cut in Jim Nabours now. “You lying, low-down dog, I wish to God these boys hadn’t came! There’s only one way to handle people like you. Git out of jail—and come back! That’s all we hope.

“McCullough, do you want any more men?” he added.

“Why?” The youth laughed and rode away. “Fall in there, prisoners!” he commanded. “Ride for the ferry trail. I wouldn’t try to ride too fast.”

“Oh, we’ll be back!” called the gang captain, defiant still.

“I certainly do hope you will!” replied Nabours fervently. “I’ll come all the way back from Aberlene, ef I ever get there, just to be around here when you-all do come!”

A chorus of jeers and curses came back from the prisoners. The Rangers said never a word, but herded their men on ahead.

Jim Nabours jerked up his mount—a sign to the herd riders, and the latter swung away, glad enough to have the herd still under control. The animals began to edge out, to thin, to spread, to graze. Old Jim Nabours rode to the edge, singing a song of his own, as he sometimes did when especially wrathful:

“Bud Dunk, he was a Ranger, a Ranger of renown,

But says he to the cashier when he ride into the town.

Says he, ‘I need some money that the bank here owes to me.

So please to make it plenty, fer I’m broke ez I kin be——’ ”

A scattering chorus came to him, roared out of the rising dust cloud:

“Oh, please, sir, make it plenty, fer we’re broke ez we kin be!”

CHAPTER VIII
THE FISHHOOK

“CUSS take the law!” fumed old Jim Nabours. “I never seen nothing but trouble come out of law. Ef it wouldn’t of been for them Ranger boys we’d of killed Rudabaugh and his outfit right here, and that’d of ended the whole business. Courts? They own the courts; they’ll all be out and at it again inside a week. Ef they meet up with us again I shore hope there won’t be no Rangers. When come it a cowman can’t take care of his own cows?

“But come on, now, Del, push ’em over to the new pens; we got to work this Noah’s ark right now.”

Nabours and Dell Williams slowly edged out a string of cattle, making a point. Swing men rode gently somewhat farther back; others pushed in the stragglers. Quietly, efficiently, with the long skill of men who all their lives had “savvied cows,” they broke the compact mass into a long-strung-out line, traveling quietly in the direction laid out by the leaders. The herd submitted itself to guidance. All went well until they reached the raw new lines of the crude branding chute, when a few of the old mossy horns began to stare and then to roll their tails as though about to break away; but trouble finally was averted.

The swing men crowded and cut the front of the herd to one side of the others. Back of them others began to circle the long procession. In a few moments two herds were made on the flat near the branding pens. In half an hour three irons of the Fishhook road brand, made by Buck the cook, were getting cherry heat in the fire near the chute. Men pushed a thin line of animals out of the smaller bunch, heading them for the fences. Once in the wings, they were crowded into the V till a row of a dozen or twenty stood in single file back of the rising gate. Then, amid swaying that strained the rawhide lashings of the new fence, and to the chorus of bawls of the creatures as the hot irons sizzled into their hides, the Fishhook began to appear above the T. L. holding and owner’s brand.

“Tally one T. L. four! Two T. L. four! One T. L. yearling! One T. L. yearling! One T. L. two!” Sometimes a man would grin as he came back to the fire. “This here T. L. is the only thing I kin see on ary cow so fur!” quoth Len Hersey, top hand. “Ef it wasn’t put on right good we kin fix it some with a runnin’ iron. Keep about two straights in the fire.”

“Tally one three!” came a voice. “Say, Del, this here Fishhook is the plumb catchin’est road brand ary feller ever did see! Does my eyes deceive me?”

Laughter and jests, dust, noise, lowings and groanings, the clack and clatter of cattle moved into the wings, the smell of the herd blending with the odor of singed hair—all the old-time flavor of cattle work in the open—went on now, the thin wedge of tail-twisting, surly brutes pushed out of the chute gate increasing steadily. The nucleus of the Del Sol trail herd grew steadily, until finally the red sun fell below the distant screen of the live-oak groves.

“She pops!” said Del Williams.

“Shore she pops!” assented Nabours. “We’ll get the boss up a herd if we have to make ’em out of red dirt, way God made old Uncle Adam!

“Hello!” he added. “There’s the boss a-coming!”

Indeed, through the dust, wind-carried up the flat, there showed the white feet and front of Blancocito. Taisie Lockhart, again in her range clothing, stained and worn, her hair once more clubbed between her shoulders with a shoe string, rode up soberly, trotting close to the pens.

“How are you, Jim?” said she. “How are you all, men? Where’ve you been three days back?”

Jim Nabours wiped his face on the dirty kerchief he pulled around his neck.

“Where we been, Miss Taisie?” he answered. “Why, we been strolling around with our light geetars amid the cactus, a-rounding up the finest road herd ever put up in Texas.”

“But, Jim, we said maybe beeves—fours or long threes! Look yonder in the chute, man! There’s two fours, that’s all! The rest are twos and calves!”

“I’m Noah, ma’am,” said Jim Nabours gravely. “This here, now, is my ark. Don’t you come horning in. Of course, ef we do got a lot of she-stuff and mixed ages along of the others, how could we help it? Reckon it’s cheaper to iron ’em when you got ’em, ain’t it?”

“But you’re ironing everything, and all in the road brand, calves and all!”

“Ma’am,” said Jim Nabours solemnly, “ef we wasn’t short of hands I’d shore fire the segundo, Del Williams. He’s the onthoughtedest man I ever did see. Now look what he done, him being in a dream! I expect he done run our iron on a dozen or so that ain’t beeves a-tall! And it won’t come off in the wash! Now, how can we get it off? Miss Taisie, as the daughter of the best cowman Texas ever seen, what would you segest fer me to do with Del?”

The girl turned aside to hide a smile that made her cheek dimple.

“Well, I’ve got a pair of eyes,” said she.

“Shore you have, Miss Taisie, and fine ones, too. I wish they was different. But any good cowman has got to have two kinds of a eye—one to tell a brand fur as he can see a critter and t’other not to see no brand that he don’t want to see. Now you go on back to the house, Miss Taisie, and leave us alone, and we’ll turn in up to Aberlene, ef there is ary such place, with the damnedest, evenest, finest bunch of beeves you ever seen, every one in the T. L. and Fishhook, and all of ’em yores. God bless our home!”

He flicked at the white stripe on Blancocito’s hips with the end of his own bridle rein; whereat Blancocito sprang a dozen feet to one side—but Taisie with him, not at all concerned.

“Don’t, Jim,” she protested. “You always treat me like a child.”

“Well, ain’t you?” replied Jim. “Shore you’ll be the richest child in Texas six months from now.”

The girl reined over to where her faithful adjutant stood, led him one side. Her face was troubled.

“Jim——” she began.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Jim, what’s wrong around Del Sol? Something’s wrong!”

“What is it, Miss Taisie?”

She drew yet closer.

“Some one’s been around the house.”

“What? What’s that?”

“Some one’s been in the house! I don’t know just when. You know my little old trunk—I mean the Spanish-leather box with the big hinges?”

“Why, yes, ma’am. I seen it a hundred times in the front room—seen it just the other day.”

“It was in the front room. It isn’t there now.”

“What? What you telling me, Miss Taisie?”

“It’s gone! I missed it to-day.”

“What all was in it?”

“Some things of my mother’s; laces, you know, a silver comb, pictures—and some clothes. That’s almost all, except a lot of old papers. There were bundles and bundles of my father’s old land scrip. He was always buying it, as you know; no one could stop him. He said it would be worth something some day.”

“Miss Taisie, he said right! He told me that land would be worth five dollars a acre in Texas some day; maybe even ten. He said a beef four’d bring twelve dollars here on the Texas range. He said he was going to buy land, all he could get, at five cents a acre, while he could. And he’d of got a heap more in his pasture if he’d lived. And his trunk of scrip——”

“By my mother’s grave!”—the girl rose to her full height in her stirrups, in a sudden tempest of wrath, her right hand high above her head—“I swear I’ll make the drive for him—and her! I swear if I ever find the thief that came in my house I’ll live for my family’s revenge, and for that alone!”

“Jim, they’re robbing us! I know that herd! Do you think I’m blind! Don’t I know cows? Yon’s the leavings, the trimmings, of the Del Sol range! All right! We’ll drive the leavings. My word and my life for it, I’ll be only a man now till all these things are squared! Will you stand by me?”

“You ort’n to ask, Miss Taisie.”

“Jim, now listen! I want every corner of the bunk house searched, every tent, every wagon, every jacal, before we start north. If we find the box we’ll know what to do.”

A Paramount Picture. North of 36.
“JIM, WE’VE GOT TO DRIVE OUR HERDS NORTH—IT’S OUR ONLY SALVATION.”

CHAPTER IX
THE TRAIL

AN EMPIRE in embryo lay threading out vein filaments, insentient, antenatal—Texas, not having an identity, not yet born, but soon to be a world. What a world! How rich a world!

Above, for two thousand miles, nigh a thousand miles right-angled across the needle’s path, swept another unknown world, the Great West of America, marked till now only by big-game trails and pony paths and wagon tracks. The road to Oregon was by then won. The iron rails that very year bound California to the Union. But nothing bound Texas to the Union. Unknown, discredited, aloof, a measureless wilderness herself, she did not know of the wilderness above her, and until now had cared nothing for it.

In this central part of the great, varied state the grasses grew tall, the undergrowth along the streams was rank. The live oaks were gigantic, standing sometimes in great groves, always hung with gray Spanish moss. Among and beyond these lay vast glades, prairies, unfenced pastures for countless game and countless cows. It was a land of sunshine and of plenty.

A cool haze, almost a mist, lay before dawn on the prairie lands. Now, when morning came on the Del Sol range, a sea of wide horns moved above the tall grass. With comfortable groans the bedded herd arose one by one, in groups, by scores and hundreds, stretching backs and tails. The night riders ceased their circles, the cattle began to spread out slowly, away from the bed ground, a little eminence covered with good dry grass and free of hillocks, holes and stones, chosen by men who knew the natural preferences of kine.

A clatter of hoofs came as the young night herd—the boy Cinquo Centavos, vastly proud of his late promotion—drove up his remuda to the rope corral. A blue smoke rose where the cook pushed mesquite brands together again. It was morning on the range. Aye, and it was morning of a new, great day for unknown Texas and the unknown West that lay waiting far above her.

The two great trails—that running east and west, that running north and south—now were about to approach and to meet at a great crossroads, the greatest and most epochal crossroads the world has even seen. Here was the vague beginning of a road soon to be bold and plain; almost as soon to be forgotten.

Slow and tousled, men and boys kicked out of the cotton quilts which had made their scant covering, each taking from under his saddle pillow the heavy gun and such hat as he had. Few had need to hunt for boots, for most had slept in them. Bearded, hard, rude, unbrushed, they made a wild group when they stumped up to the morning fire, where each squatted on one knee while using tin cup and tin plate. Cutlery was scanty, but each man had some sort of knife. Sugar there was none, but a heavy black molasses did for sweetening to the coffee, which itself largely was made of parched grain. A vessel of great red beans had been hidden in the hot ashes overnight; there was plenty of bacon aswim in the pans for spearing; and of corn pones, baked before the fire, many lay about. Of this provender Buck, the negro cook, made them all free by his call to “Come an’ git it!” Of the regular chuck wagon of the well-appointed later trail outfits, of the rough but better abundance, there was no more than faint prophecy here in the rude high-wheeled Mexican cart. In truth, the Del Sol outfit was poor, bitterly poor. Here was a noli-me-tangere assembly of truculent men whose adventure into unknown lands bordered close upon the desperate.

Of the later accepted costume of the trail and range, there was no more than indication. The hats were a dozen sorts for a dozen men. The neck scarf of each man above his collarless tow shirt was a scanty plain red bandanna, for use, not show. Spurs, saddles, bridles, boots—these things were good, for the Spanish influence lingered in Texas a generation after the “dead body of Coahuila” had been shaken off. The saddles were heavy and broad of horn, each with double cinches. The stirrups were without exception covered with heavy tapaderos. The reata at each horn was thin, of hide close braided, pliable, tough as steel. Of chaparajos, or leggings, as these men always called them, perhaps a half dozen pairs were owned by older men; the young could not afford them. Now, freed of the necessity of riding chaparral in the round-up of the herd, the leggings were cast into the cook wagon along with the ragged bed rolls. So now they stood or kneeled or squatted, coatless, collarless, unbrushed, belted and booted, without exception thin, almost without exception tall, each with his white-and-black checkered pants in his boots, his garb light, insufficient, meager. They were poor.

But of good weaponry these men of the border were covetous. The older men had each a pair of the army Colts—cap and ball, for fixed ammunition was not yet on the range. His pistol flask, his little cleaning rod, his bag of round balls, each man guarded with more care than his less weight of coin. The rifles were nondescript as the men themselves. One man had a revolving Colt rifle, a relic of the New Mexican expedition of ’42. Of the new Henry rifles, repeaters, many had found their way thus far south; and of the heavy Sharpe rifles, such as were used by Berdan’s sharpshooter corps in the Civil War—with the great Minié ball and its parchment cartridge and the lever breech action—a half dozen survived. Most prized by some, execrated by others, were the Spencer repeating carbines, throwing their heavy ball with at least approximate accuracy if one could guess the distance of the shot. The Yager and the Kentucky rifle, which won Texas, now had disappeared. The first trail men had yet to wait seven years before the Winchester and the Frontier Colt ushered in the general day of fixed ammunition. The first wild cavalcades of the Texas trail certainly were unstandardized.

Of the Del Sol men, all alike were silent now. Jim Nabours, a long leg bent up, knelt over his plate on the ground. Del Williams, bearded, young, comely, sat on a cart tongue. Sanchez, old and gray, was under the cart itself. Cinquo Centavos, name and family unknown, called Sinker by his fellows, slim, eager, boyish, stood as he ate, shivering in his cottons. A reticent, ragged, grim, unprepossessing band they made, ill matched and wild as the diverse cattle which now began to edge out from their bed ground.

Nabours, shutting his jackknife and putting it in his pocket, paused as he saw a man ride out from the cover of the mesquite. He knew him—McMasters, who had not been seen since the affair of the Rudabaugh herd cutters.

“Huh! There’s Gonzales at last! He’s powerful searchy about his work.”

McMasters came in, the last at the fire, and was hardly welcomed. About him hung still the indefinable difference that set him apart from these whose lives were spent in the saddle, and this now had grown intensified. He was dressed as they were, but his garments fitted better, he was neater, trimmer. His eye, gray and narrow, was calm, his tongue silent as ever. A slow ease, deliberate, unhurrying, unwasting, marked his movements. Still he seemed with them, not of them, and they held their peace of him.

“I ask your pardon,” he said at length to Nabours, “but you see, I’m a cow hand and a sheriff both. I had a little business overnight. I’m ready to make a hand now if I can.”

“Well, we’re ready to pull out,” replied the foreman. “Del, didn’t Sanchez tell you the two carts was ready?”

“Si Señor,” nodded his segundo.

“Old Milly went to bed in hern last night, to get a good start, she said,” volunteered Len Hersey. “She taken her old Long Tom musket to bed with her. You see, enduring the war, Milly’s husband, Tom, he done jine a Yankee nigger regiment and never did come back home a-tall. That’s how come Milly to go north—she’s lookin’ fer Tom. ‘Ef Ah ever kotch sight’n dat nigger,’ says she, ‘Ah sho gwine blow out his lights fer him.’ ”

“Well, don’t let Milly talk war too much, so’s to spoil her cooking for the boss,” said Nabours. “They’ll make a separate camp. Put Anita on Miss Taisie’s cart, for when she gets tired of the saddle Milly can ride in the cook cart.”

“Is Miss Lockhart really going?” asked Dan McMasters suddenly.

“She shore is going. I told her to pull out late in the morning from the big house and follow our trail. Lord help the girl! There ain’t no woman belongs on a fool trip like this here one.

“Move ’em out, boys,” said he at length, quietly. “Mr. McMasters, I want you on point, with Del Williams.”

And so, unemotionally, there began one of the wildest and strangest journeys ever made in any land.

Under the ancient art of handling cattle, known to each of these men, the herd began slowly to move. McMasters and Del Williams, a couple of hundred yards apart, gently threaded out the farther edge of the loosely grazing cattle, along whose flanks a dozen hands sat loose in saddle, ready to take their appointed places on swing and drag. A few old steers, rangy, tall, wild, sunburned, trotted out ahead—the natural vanguard, pacemaking, electing itself then and there, and holding place for a thousand miles. The point almost formed itself, as should be; for the art of trailing cattle was to use their instincts, not to alter them; to follow them and not to crowd them; to let them feed and travel, and never to take a back track on the road.

Gently, intoning a comfortable bar or so now and then, the swing men spread and gently pushed additional numbers back of the front wedge. The column began to form, to stretch, loose, indefinite, not close packed, stopping, hurrying, turning to look back, lowing, no set purpose having yet been developed in the vast band. A pair of swing men, no more, must serve to control each three or four hundred head of cattle on the march.

The rangy vanguard were kept moving out, heading north, still on their own native range. Soon they struck a steady walk, in which they were encouraged.

“Roll along, little dogies! Roll along, roll along!” chanted Len Hersey, on the head swing, as the great motley herd got form.

Far at the back came the unhappy drivers of the drag—the old, the maimed, the halt and the blind, steers bowed down with weight of woe. Here were gaunt cows, heavy with young, calves newborn trotting with their dams, all in a vast pastoral hegira.

Young Cinquo Centavos, hustling his caballada together, wailed in a high thin treble. “Neeter, Neeter, Wah-a-hah-neeter, ast thy-y-y so-o-oul ef we mus’ part!”

Came shufflng of hoofs, crack and creak of joints, rattling of wide horns not yet shaken down into good spacing in the march. At times the great remuda, a hundred and fifty head of saddle stock, would thunder off in a brief side break, and Cinquo must cease in his appeal to Juanita. Forsooth, to his young soul Juanita was a tall maid, of red hair that curled up only at the ends.

In less than an hour after they first moved, the lone herd of Del Sol was made and trailed. Sinuous among the tall grasses, it rolled out and on, northbound. It made a vast historic picture, in a vast forgotten day; a day when a new world was made and peopled overnight.

Jim Nabours rode ahead of the herd as general guide and forelooper. From his place, a half mile in advance, he turned back in his saddle, looking at the long cloud of dust; the rolling sea of backs, the pale swing of wide horns above. His fierce soul exulted at the sight. He shut his teeth, his eyes gleaming, as he faced north and settled down into a plodding walk.

Ten in the morning, and the last of Del Sol’s drag, little calves and all, misfits, ignorant mistakes and all, had rabbled off and away, sore under the fly-bitten road brand fresh on every hide. The dust cloud was hours old at the upper edge of the flat, when at the opposite edge, on the rim that divided the flat and the big house of Del Sol, another and lesser dust cloud appeared over the broken turf.

It was made by two rude two-wheeled carts, each drawn by a double span of oxen. The roughly spoked wheels, stiffened by slats lashed on with rawhide thongs, emitted shrieking protest at each revolution on the axle. Each carreta had a tilt of canvas stretched above its rough bows, and each had certain cargo. On the front seat of the first vehicle sat old Anita, brown and gray and wrinkled. The rear cart was handled by a vast negro woman with a long musket at her side—Milly, as usual grumbling to herself.

These two women, old beyond love and life, doggedly loyal, passionately affectionate, made the bodyguard of Anastasie Lockhart, educated and dead-broke orphan, setting out into the world at twenty-two on one of the most impossible adventures any woman ever knew.

Just now Anastasie Lockhart, trousered, booted, gloved and hatted like some slim, curiously eye-arresting young man, rode alone on her crossbar, Blancocito. Her mass of heavy hair was down her back, burned tawnier beyond the shade of the sombrero. Her eye moody, she gazed on ahead at the procession that held every friend she had on earth and every dollar that she owned.

She dropped back and rode alongside the leading cart.

“Anita,” she said, “if I only had my stolen trunk, I’d not be leaving a single thing on earth behind me!”

Anita vouchsafed nothing for a time. She understood English.

“Tronk?” said she presently. “What-a tronk, señorita?”

“The one that was stolen from my parlor—you know very well what one.”

“That-a-tronk? He is not stole. He’s back. I setta on heem now.”

“What? What’s that, Anita?”

“Si, Seguro. I gotta heem under seat, serape on top. Sanchez, my man, he bring. Las’ night he got heem back.”

“The lost trunk? Where? Where did he find it?”

“Sanchez, he look in waggone, he look in corral. In one waggone, come from Gonzales, he find-a thees-a tronk. Sanchez, he tak-a heem and put-a heem in here. You like-a heem, dose tronk?”

The hand of Anastasie Lockhart fell lax at her saddle horn.

“Anita, tell me, was it in his wagon—Mr. McMasters’, the Gonzales wagon that went back yesterday? Was it in the wagon of Señor McMasters, the sheriff of Gonzales?”

“Oh, si!”

“Ah!” A long sighing breath.

“Vamenos!” exclaimed Anastasie Lockhart after a long time. She looked straight forward, not turning, as one who left a used-out world behind.

CHAPTER X
IN DAYS OF OLD

“WE got ’em going!” called Jim Nabours, riding back to his men. “Keep ’em moving! Push ’em hard for the first day, so’s they’ll be tired and sleep good. Look at them long shanks walk! I’ll bet that old dun coaster that’s done elected hisself head leader has got horns six feet acrost, and ef he’s ten year old he’s a hunderd. Well, anyhow, he’s on his way north. And-a-lay, old Alamo!”

“He knows about as much where he’s going as we do,” said Del Williams, whom he had addressed.

“Shore he does, and more. I come from Uvalde, where it’s plumb wild. I was raised on squirrel and corn pone, and all the learning I got was out the little old blue-back speller. But my pap done told me that since Texas taken most of the earth away from Mayheeco, Uncle Sam, he’s had about six government surveys made a-trying and a-trying to find whereat is the one hundredth meridian, and likewise how far north is 36-30, so’s they can tell where Texas stops at. They can’t not one of them people agree even with hisself where either of them places is at. Them surveyors don’t know no more’n that claybank steer. Trail? There ain’t no trail. We’re lost from the first jump, unless’n that steer knows. There wasn’t never no Chisholm Trail nowheres, and I can whip any man says there was. I didn’t read of no such thing in the blue-back speller. But I allow, give me a good North Star and a dun steer, I kin find Aberlene ef there is ary such place.”

“Oh, we’ll find a trail,” replied the younger man. “I’m telling you, there is a trace called the Chisholm Trail north of the Red River. You can get to Baxter Springs that way, or to Little Rock, and I reckon to Wichita; and Aberlene’s north of Wichita somewheres. There’s grass and water all the way through.”

“All trails is alike to a cow man,” assented Nabours. “My pap said all trails was begun by horse thiefs. My pap come west into Texas from Louisianny. He come over the Trammel Trace, from the prairies west. Injuns made that, but it didn’t get nowheres. Injuns, horse thiefs, whisky peddlers—I reckon that’s about how the cow trails started. What they call the Chisholm Trail runs up to the Arbuckle Mountains. That’s where we’ll hit the reservation Indians. They’ll all want beef—and whisky.

“There’s a road up from Santone to San Marcos and Austin, so I reckon we’ll head up Plum Creek and strike in north over Cedar and Onion. Ef there is a trail we’ll find it. Ef there ain’t we’ll make one. Foller that dun steer—he knows where Aberlene is at.”

Wheeling and riding far at one side of the scattered herd, the foreman rode to the rear, where the cows and calves were straggling on. His drag on that side met him—Sid Collins, flap-hatted, tobacco-stained.

“Corporal,” said he, “we got more cows now’n what we had at breakfast. They’d ought to be riding mostly on a rawhide under the cook wagon, but that nigger says if we put ary ’nother calf in his cart he’s gwine fer to quit right now. Milly’s so big she fill up the hull carreter; and besides, old Sanchez and Aniter has got it plumb full of chickens.”

“Calfs, huh? Well, now, that somehow hadn’t seem to come to my mind none, about calfs. How many new ones you got?”

“Six. Not big enough to brand, but big enough to bawl. An’ we got six cows on the prod, follerin’ the cook cart, so’s the cook he’s afraid to git offen the seat. Ef this here now keep up, we’ll have half the herd in the cook cart and the other half follerin’, lookin’ for war. I most hatter shoot one cow right now. We got to hold the remuda way back. Miss Taisie’s behind that, even, with the other cart.”

“Tell Miss Taisie to ride front, where she belongs on her own cows, son.”

“I segest that, but she won’t,” said the troubled cow hand.

“Does she know who’s riding point?”

“Shore! I told her.”

“And she wouldn’t come?”

“No.”

Nabours shut his lips grimly; then, as usual when in trouble, broke out into song: “Oh, granny, will yore dog bite, dog bite, dog bite? Granny, will yore dog bite, dog bite me?”

“Leave me shoot all them calfs, Mr. Nabours,” urged Sid Collins. “They kain’t walk, an’ they ain’t wuth a damn. Then the cows’d behave.”

“It’s what we shore orto do,” agreed Nabours. “They hold up the herd. But we need every critter we got. Maybe we’ll find somebody to trade ’em to fer something.”

“Why don’t we cut back all the she-stuff an’ on’y drive steers, Mr. Jim?”

“Because ef we left a cow or a calf on Del Sol this spring, by fall neither’d be on our range. As well as clean it and let it take a chance as have thieves do it for us. No, ef our calfs die, I’m going to die ’em as fur north as I can. Yes, and ef ary one of ’em dies I’m going to run the T. L. iron on him after he dies—and, yes, the Fishhook road brand over that—so’s’t the buzzards’ll know whose stock they’re a-eating of! My good Lord! . . . Oh, granny, will yore dog bite, dog bite——”

He rode on back, through the thinning dust. The two carts were still a mile behind. He could see the white-band horse ridden by the mistress of Del Sol.

There were sixteen men on the T. L. herd. Sixteen loved Taisie Lockhart in sixteen ways, save for the one element of fiercely reverent loyalty. This grizzled old foreman loved her as his child. His brows narrowed, his grim mouth shut tight under the graying beard as he approached the slender figure which came on, facing her great road into the unknown.

“Push on up, Miss Taisie,” called Nabours. “Yore place is at the head. We’ll see nothing hurts ye.”

“I don’t want to ride front,” replied the girl. “You’ve got men enough there. Who’s riding point besides Del?”

“Mr. Dan McMasters is on left point, Miss Lockhart,” said Jim Nabours quietly.

“Oh!”

“Well, he’s been over the road north, anyways—the onliest one of us has. He’s a cowman. So fur, I taken him fer a square man. Not that I care a damn fer a hand’s morerls. He may be a horse thief, but jest so he don’t steal from us I don’t care.”

“Suppose a hand did steal from us.”

“I never did hear of no such thing!”

“Jim, listen! I’ve found my trunk.”

“No! Where at?”

“Sanchez found it in the—well, the McMasters wagon that went back to Gonzales this morning. We’ve got it in our cart now.”

Nabours looked far out over the gray and green of the landscape a long time before he ventured speech. His face then was sad.

“I’ve knowed men shot for less,” said he at length. “But are you sure? Do you know who done it?”

“I haven’t seen anything. I only know what Sanchez says. None of my men stole the trunk. It meant nothing to them. The land scrip in it might some day mean a fortune to a man who did know about such things; and he did know it was there; and he did say that there’d be a boom in land and cows in Texas in less than ten years, maybe five.

“Well, we Lockharts always did open our doors. We thought the world was honest!—It’s hard for me to doubt—to doubt—him.”

Downcast, she rode on. It was long before Nabours made comment.

“Miss Taisie,” said he at last, “there can’t no man rob you and get away with it. Us men won’t have it. After supper I’ll be back at yore camp. I’ll have with me my left-point man. I’ll have besides my segundo and Sanchez and six of the best hands of Del Sol.”

“What do you mean to do, Jim?”

“Mean to do? You ast that, and you a cowman, and daughter of one? I mean to hold a court, that’s what I mean to do. What us fellows decides is right is what’ll happen. It’ll happen soon.”

“But, Jim”—the girl was suddenly pale—“we’d have to take any—any suspected man to Austin. And he’s a sheriff himself!”

“Austin be damned, ma’am! Likewise, sher’f be damned! Del Sol runs her own laws. That man’s father and yores was friends—until the war. Then they wasn’t so much, maybe. Calvin McMasters was a Yankee sympathizer. We don’t know it wasn’t him that killed yore father. But there can’t no man rob Burleson Lockhart’s girl and get by with it!

“We’ll try him fair,” he added. “I’d never of believed it. This shore does hurt.”

“It hurts, Jim. He was our visitor. Did he eat—with you boys?”

“He shore et. We taken him in. He done broke the one law of this country.”

CHAPTER XI
THE COURT ON THE TRAIL

THE sun swung low. Nabours rode back, addressing his point men impersonally. “We bed on the slope, yon. Let ’em water full.”

As the cattle quenched their thirst the men quietly pressed them to the left of the route, urging them one side, blocking further progress. The half-wild cattle seemed to know that here, on high, smooth ground, breeze-swept and dry, with good mattress not only of new but old grass, they could get a good night’s lodging. They grazed, slowed down, and the men held them till they should bed down for sleep. Over four thousand cattle, of all ages—too large and too mixed a body for good trailing—now were by way of forming good trail habits.

But Nabours left the herd and spoke a time with Del Williams, five other men of his oldest. Together they rode to where Dan McMasters sat his horse, idly watching the cattle in the cool of evening. They rode so silently, so grimly, that a shadow of menace must have lain before them. Without a word the tall, slender figure whirled his horse to front them. Like a rattler, he always was on guard. His elbows nearly level with his hips, his two hands touched his guns.

“Yes, gentlemen?” McMasters spoke quietly.

“Better drop the guns,” said Nabours, also unagitated. “There’s six of us.”

“There’s twelve of me,” said Dan McMasters evenly. “You wanted me?”

“Yes. Drop yore guns on the ground.”

“Don’t any of you make a move,” was the other’s reply to this. “I don’t know what you mean.” Both guns were out.

“We came to arrest you, for trial, to-night, now. That’s my duty.”

“Nabours,” said McMasters, slowly, at last, “I ought to kill you for that. But I’ve got to have this clear.”

“Give up your guns and stand fair trial. We’ll make it clear.”

“No man lives who shall touch my guns. But who brings charge against Dan McMasters, sheriff and ranger and deputy marshal of the United States? What sort of mean joke is this?”

“It’s Miss Taisie Lockhart brings the charge,” said Nabours.

The young man flinched as though struck.

“What charge?”

“Theft; stealing from a friend; stealing from folks that has fed you.”

Slowly the black muzzles drooped. With a movement as deliberate as their withdrawal had been swift, McMasters thrust both guns into their scabbards, unbuckled his belt and hung it over his saddle horn.

“Has she sent for me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’ll come.” McMasters spoke as though with difficulty.

Nabours pointed to a little fire whose smoke arose at the edge of a clump of cover a quarter of a mile away; a small tent, two white-topped carts making an individual encampment, apart from the trail cook’s mess. Without a word the accused man, his head slightly dropped forward, rode toward the fire, both hands on the pommel of his saddle, looking neither to the right nor to the left.

Anastasie Lockhart came from her little tent at the call of Nabours. Her hands suddenly were clasped at her throat as she saw the tall figure among these other stern-faced men. It was too late for her now to reason, to withdraw her charge.

“We brung in the man,” announced Nabours. “You are the judge. We’ll hear what he has to say.”

A strange, inscrutable quality was one of the singular characteristics of Dan McMasters. His face was a coldly serene mask now as he stood beside his horse, looking straight at the tall girl who stood, woman in spite of her man’s garb, her men’s surroundings. If any emotion could be traced on his face it was a shade of pity, of great patience. Concern for his personal safety seemed not to be in his mind. This indifference to danger, this calm, did not lack effect. The men who guarded him suddenly wished they were well out of it.

“I a judge? No! I’ve nothing to say,” Taisie choked.

“Yes, you have had something to say, and you done said it to me,” rejoined Nabours. “You started something and you got to go through with it. Set down there on that bed roll. You got to tell us all what you told me. As owner of this herd, you’re the main judge. There can’t nobody shirk no right and no duty here.

“Set down here, prisoner. It seems to me you’d orto give up your weapons to the court.”

“I’ll give Miss Lockhart anything on earth but my guns,” said McMasters evenly. “No one touches them but me.”

“I reckon no man here is scared to do what he’s got to do,” remarked Nabours simply.

McMasters made no reply. He never had a hand far from his revolvers. He seated himself now so that he could face all his accusers, flat on the ground. His buckled pistol belt lay over one leg. An exact observer must have noted that the toe of one boot rested inside the farther end of the buckled belt, so that proper resistance would be offered in case their owner should snatch at the butts of the heavy guns, both of which were turned ready for convenient grasp. So he sat, facing the jury, facing his Portia—facing what was a far worse thing than death itself to any man of honor.

They were a jury of his peers, as nearly as might be, though he had had no hand in their selection. Had he known all the histories of these men he might have challenged for cause Del Williams, trail segundo, who rode right point. He had heard a man or two pass a rude joke or so, although he did not know that as Del Sol ranch hand Del Williams, ten years her senior, had known Burleson Lockhart’s daughter from her infancy. The way of Del Williams’ love was silence and reverence. But Del Williams was of some chivalric strain. That now was to be proved. That his most dangerous rival was this prisoner he knew perfectly well by the primal instincts of man; and now came a certain test.

“Del,” began Nabours, turning to his lieutenant as next in authority, “tell us what you know about this man since he come to our house.”

“I don’t know anything at all,” answered Williams slowly. “Ef I did I wouldn’t tell it.”

His thin, brown-bearded face was set in quiet resolution. Talebearer he would not be. His fellows looked at him stolidly.

“Ma’am,” went on the prosecutor, “you told me yore trunk was stole out of yore parlor. It had papers in it—land scrip, God knows how many sections.”

“Yes, I missed the trunk.” Taisie was very pale, her voice a whisper.

“Mr. Dan McMasters, did you ever see that trunk? I hate to ask you.”

“Oh, yes; I did.”

“What was in it?”

“I don’t know. It was open, close to me, where I sat in the parlor. I saw some lace, some women’s gloves, or mitts. I didn’t look again.”

“Did you see it after that?”

“Yes.”

“Where was it?”

“Near the gate—outside the gate, in the edge of the brush. I thought it odd it should be there. I was sure I’d seen it up at the house, the only time I was in the house. You were there.”

“Shore I was! She said all her father’s land scrip was in that box; we all said it’d be worth money some day to any cowman. You heard it. You knowed where the trunk was and what was in it.”

“Yes; so did you.”

“Then why did you put it in your wagon that was going back to Gonzales.”

“I did not. That is either a mistake or a lie.”

“But it was there. Sanchez found it there. He taken it and put it in Anita’s carreta. It’s there now. We declare that to you. It was missing from the house. It was found in yore wagon. Yore wagon was going back home. That was right where some men was laying up in the brush when you left. You didn’t let me foller them. You didn’t show up when them same men—we proved by the split-hoof track—was trying to cut our herd. Only the Rangers saved that. Ef you’re a Ranger, why wasn’t you there?”

“I’ll not have any man ask me such questions.”

“Don’t tell us what you’ll have or won’t have. You’ll have what we give you, no more, no less. Explain how come that trunk in your wagon. Not a man on Del Sol except you and me knowed what was in it or where it was. Now who done put it in yore wagon? It looked right easy to sneak that south while we was going north, huh? And it with half a million acres in it.”

“How come him to bring ary wagon up here anyhow?” demanded Cal Taney, a top rider on Del Sol.

“I wouldn’t ask him that,” said Del Williams quietly.

“But I do”—retorted Nabours.

“Well, I had some supplies, you know,” answered McMasters. “A wagon goes better than a cart. You said you didn’t want my wagon.”

“A wagon carries trunks or boxes better.”

“Yes.”

“Shore! Was you planning fer a load both ways—what you’d kerry in a wagon from Del Sol?”

“You may guess,” said McMasters, suddenly dull red. “Most of you have guessed.”

“We have!” asserted Nabours. “Miss Taisie, ma’am”—he turned to the white-faced girl—“this here is hard for you. Del won’t talk and won’t vote. The rest of us thinks the trunk and wagon is not explained. Am I right, men?”

Four men nodded. Del Williams, gentleman in rags, sat staring straight ahead. The gray eyes of Dan McMasters were fixed on the pale face of the woman whom now he knew he had loved since first he saw her, would always love. What price?

“We’re the jury, ma’am,” said Nabours. “You’re the judge. It looks to us like all along the McMasterses was Yankee sympathizers. It looks like this man, after all, was standing in with his own kind of politics at Austin. That explains a lot of things that’s been going on. Rangers? Arrest them folks? Huh! I’ll bet they won’t stay in jail two days! You’ll have to say sentence on this man we-all thought was square, thought was our friend, a square Texan and a good man. What shall it be?”

Taisie Lockhart, Portia, spoke not of the quality of mercy. Instead, she bowed her head in her hands and wept without reserve. That act utterly changed the whole complexion of the trial.

Dan McMasters threw up a hand—his left hand. An instant later he was on his feet, but his attitude had no hostility.

“Wait, men!” he commanded. “Don’t move, any of you! I’ll pronounce sentence on myself!

“Of course, I don’t recognize any trial or any court here—I came myself. But some men do fool things. You’d like enough say death or banishment. All right! Let it be banishment! You haven’t proved more than a suspicion. I’ll accept banishment and leave the herd quietly now—not taking anything but what I have now, here.”

His face hardened into gray marble.

“If Miss Lockhart has had one suspicion in her mind that I—that I’d—well, touch anything of hers, or of any other human being’s, then it’s plain enough I don’t belong here. I can’t square that for her. She can never square that with me.

“I’m going now!”

There was no hand or voice raised at this. Turning his back on them for the first time, McMasters swung his belt to place, buckled it, caught his saddle horn and was mounted and away, not looking back. He rode gently, easily, straight. They knew no more of him now than they had before.

“Del! Del, call him back!” broke out Taisie Lockhart. But Del Williams shook his head. “I wish I could, Miss Taisie,” said he simply. “I don’t reckon any of us could now.”

“It had to be,” said Nabours after a time. “I’ll pay him back after we sell our herd. Del Sol can’t have no obligations to him now. But he’s one of the mysteriousest men ever crossed this range. He’s cold, that man. He needs watching.”

“Pay him back? What do you mean, Jim?” Taisie was still in open tears. But she got no reply from her foreman.

“He’s a killer, Jim,” broke in Cal Taney. “We know his ree-cord. He’s done killed five or six men a’ready, young as he is—four since he was sher’f and not countin’ Mexicans. He’s bad, that feller.”

“He never killed no man as sher’f that didn’t resist comin’ along,” ventured Del Williams. “Them two other men—one was coming at him with a ax, on the buffalo range, and t’other had a even break on the street o’ Uvalde. But no man has a chance with him on a even break.”

“He’s cold,” reiterated Nabours, hesitant. But he suddenly was agonized over the discharge of what he had held duty to his owner—the hardest duty he had ever known.

“Good thing fer us he was cold,” said Del Williams. “He’d never have went out alone if things had popped loose. He kep’ his mind and his hand to hisself. Why?”

But he knew why.

Taisie Lockhart, alone in her encampment except for her serving women, threw herself face down on her blankets. A black and ominous world surrounded her. She knew that yonder man, riding away into the twilight, never would come back to her.

“Get your night horses staked, men,” ordered Nabours gruffly, after the return to the encampment.

Against a wagon wheel old Sanchez dreamily thrummed a guitar. Sitting on his bed roll, a little apart in the dusk, Cinquo Centavos, for the time off remuda watch, engaged in song. His face was turned toward a certain star, above a certain remote camp fire, a quarter of a mile away. He thought his voice might carry so far. He was fourteen, and very, very much in love. His voice quavered and roared and broke.

“Neeter, Wah-hah-ha-neeter, ast thy s-o-oul ef we-e-e mus’ pa-a-art!”

“Damn you, kid, shut up!” called the voice of the foreman. “We got troubles enough.”

CHAPTER XII
THE COW HUNTERS

AT midnight the tired herd, after the strange fashion of cattle, rose almost as with one impulse and began slightly to straggle before lying down on the other side. The four men then on the watch, slowly riding two in each direction of the round of the massed cattle, did not redouble their monotonous crooning—time out of mind a range custom in handling cows—but kept their spaces, knowing the herd would soon again resume its rest. No unusual sight or sound alarmed them. As Len Hersey said to Del Williams, they handled sweet so far. The last watch saw the herd rise for the morning, not yet beginning to feed, standing, stretching. The cook began duties of the day, grumbling to himself.

By now, without a word, the wrinkled Anita was gathering bits of fuel, starting a tiny practicable blaze, and groans could be heard from black Milly, still in her cart, complaining of her misery. Frugal, but better than the fare of these others who now moved here and there between the tent and the massed brown blur of the herd, was the breakfast for the owner of Del Sol.

The sun still was young when Nabours, moody, morose, finished his snatched breakfast, got into saddle and resumed his lead. Len Hersey was moved up to the left point now. He and Del Williams dribbled the thin forward edge of the loosely grazing cattle into line. Without crowding, stopping, grazing, advancing, the cattle again began to trail.

No man mentioned the incidents of the night before.

“Roll erlong, little dogies! Roll erlong!” intoned light-hearted Len. “I don’t give a damn where we’re goin’, but we’re a-travelin’!

“Say, Del,” he resumed, “did you see that night kid when he fotch in the remuder this mornin’? He ain’t got no coat, no slicker, and on’y one shirt, and his pants is right wore out now. He was shiverin’ like a monkey in a rain.”

“Did he holler?” asked Del.

“No, not oncet. And he lay his string on a new horse and when he clim him the damn bronc he begin high, wide and lonesome. But the kid sets him. ‘I allus take a pitcher fust off, cool mornin’s,’ says he, ‘along of it’s bein’ so warmin’.’ ”

“Sinker’ll make a cow hand,” rejoined his companion. “He ain’t no bigger fool than the rest of us.”

Back on the line of the great herd the swing men were edging the cattle in. At the rear the two unhappy drags were again in argument with the cook. With the latter, old Sanchez agreed every new calf should be shot and abandoned. Cal Taney opposed this.

“ ’Tain’t fer you, boy, to say what you’ll do er won’t do. None o’ yore difference ef we pile calfs on yore damn kyart tell their airs sweep the groun’. I reckon afore us all gits to Aberlene we’ll have morn’n four thousand newborned calfs—straight hundred per cent. An’ ever’ one o’ ’em is a-goin’ to ride under or on top o’ yore ole kyart. You better engage in prayer, nigger.”

It was again high and hot noon. The herd had fed and walked a half-dozen miles, and now some had lain down in the shade of a live-oak fringe. Nabours, scouting ahead, for an instant paused. Turning, he came back at speed to his point men.

“Throw ’em off!” he called. “Hold ’em on this flat! There’s a big herd ahead coming down from the west. We don’t want to get mixed in.”

“Who is it?” demanded Del Williams. “Somebody ahead of us, going north?”

“Kin savvy. No wagon in sight, and a right loose drive. I’ll go back.”

He met the leader of the new herd, who was riding to meet him; a tall, loose-clad man of aquiline features. He was perhaps thirty-six years of age, and of a certain gay assurance, as his laughing eye declared. His beard, pointing down to his breast, was dark and glossy. Even in his rags he did not lack in jauntiness.

“How, amigo!” Nabours pulled up.

“Caballero!” rejoined the other, grinning and extending a brown and sinewy hand. “My name’s Dalhart, from Uvalde. Which way?”

“North,” said Nabours; and no more.

“You got a trail herd?”

“Si, Señor. Fustest and damnedest ever went out o’ Caldwell.”

“What’s your brand?”

“T. L.—we’re Del Sol people; old Colonel Lockhart.”

“Shore, I know you! Well, you’ll want to cut our herd, for we got plenty o’ yore cows.”

“So?”

“Si, Señor. You see, we’re a cow-huntin’ outfit—on spec. We been out around seven months. Started at the Nueces Cañon and worked north and west clean almost into the Staked Plains. We cleared the Concho and was over almost fur as the Pecos. We sold some cows in yore brand to a outfit going to Sumner, and ’ll account fer them on our tally—less, say a dollar a head for findin’. What they was doin’ clean over in west away from home and off their range you’ll have to say, fer I don’t know. What we got now in the T. L. we picked up mostly on the Double Mountain Fork. You know as well as me they don’t belong in there, and how they got there is something I kain’t figure. But we shore got three-four hundred o’ T. L. fours.”

“I need ’em,” said Nabours.

“There’s others from even as fur north as Palo Pinto. All north and west o’ where they belong at. What pushed ’em west?”

“Friend,” said Jim Nabours, “you’re a cowman. The truth is, Del Sol, and maybe more, has been reg’lar skinned for two years. The push has been up and west, toward the Llano. There’s been a big steal going on. It looks like some big fellers was planning to stock that open range as soon as the Comanches is got out of there.”

“How you figger that? And which way you headed now yoreself?”

“You ever heard of Aberlene?”

“No; what is it?”

“It’s the head of the railroad. A three-dollar steer here is wuth five-ten-fifteen-eighteen dollars up yon—we don’t know how much. The news has just came down. I’m trying to drive up the last leavings of our cows—Miss Taisie Lockhart’s cows, to make a little stake for her. We’ve been skinned by the gang at Austin ever sence the war. What we know we can’t always prove. I’m talking to a cowman. . . . How many men is in yore outfit?” he concluded.

“Only six of us. We got pack horses, travel light. But of all the antigodlin’ bunches o’ cows off their range—I couldn’t tell you how many!

“You see, us fellers don’t skin or drive to the coast canneries. We just turn in any brands we get, and folks usual pays us a dollar a head—er promises to. I reckon we’ve picked up two-three thousand head. Lots get loose in the thickets; we ain’t strong enough to hold ’em.

“And so you’re drivin’ for Miss Taisie Lockhart? I’ve heard of her, clean down home. Orphant, huh?”

Nabours nodded.

“Yes; and the damnedest whitest, squarest, worst-robbed orphant in Texas. I’m shamed to show my herd to a cowman, fer it’s the sorriest I ever seen. Now, I want them fours, all you can spare of ’em. I’ll trade you in cows just come in with calfs; I can’t get them on north. Seems to me like a million cows, now, every one of ’em, he taken this perticler time fer to bring a nice spotted calf inter the world when he ain’t wanted.”

Dalhart, the cow hunter, hooked a leg around his saddle horn, and Nabours went on:

“You take them cows, and calfs, right now, and throw ’en back on Del Sol, just below, and I’ll take what fours and long threes you can spare. When we get back next fall, ef we ever do, I’ll set ’em in yore brand or vent ’em to any one you say, and I’ll credit you fifty cents on each trade inside our own brand, or a dollar if you’d rather have cash then. I’m playing her wide open. Ef we bust on this drive anybody can have Del Sol—corral, house, cows, calfs and all. I just don’t want to be bothered with fresh she-stuff right now, that’s all. As for money—friend, we ain’t got none.”

“Nor nobody.”

“You know you said it! That’s why this Del Sol herd’s important. We allow to bring back money. We’ll settle then, and pay you a dollar a head fer fours, damn glad, fer they was lost off the earth so fur as we all was concerned. Well, you boys done swung over the whole north and west of Texas? That’s the biggest rodeo on spec I ever hearn.”

“Not so much money,” said the other. “We started twelve strong, all good men. One was killed by a horse. Four was killed by Comanches. It was one fight after another on the old Comanche road. We could only bring through the leavin’s, too, like yourself.

“Now, what you say is fair. We’ll throw your she-stuff back fer you—hit ain’t fur and they’ll go back easy. Take what T. L. stuff we got rounded up—and anything else you like. Comes to a orphant, no cowman in Texas is going to ast to look at yore herd.”

“One bunch has,” said Nabours. “Some day I got one or two scores to settle. But till I get back from Aberlene on the railroad, I got neither time ner money. Mr. Dalhart, our outfit’s broke! We’re eating borrowed corn meal and hog meat, and borrowed where I wish to God it wasn’t. Our remuda ain’t all our own. And as fer our brand, I’ll bet you, outside the Fishhook road brand, there ain’t hardly ary two head alike. I been liberal. Please, sir, don’t comb our herd, because it’ll make you dizzy. She’s a orphant.”

Dalhart nodded.

“I know. No man shall ride into yore herd, least of all us. Take what you want out of our stray rodeo. Ef you get back, settle with us fellers any way you like. Down in Uvalde we know of Taisie Lockhart. Ain’t a Texan but says hit’s a damn shame the way her father was a-sassinated. Since the war, there ain’t no law and no jestice in all Texas no more. Hit’s eena’most each fer hisself, and no pay fer nothing. But orphants!”

“And like her!” said Jim Nabours.

“Is she perty as she’s said fer to be?” smiled Dalhart.

“More! Come and see!”

“How?”

“She’s three miles below, in our outfit.”

“You’re not lettin’ her go up the trail!”

“Where else’d she go? She’s broke, and a reg’lar organized gang working out her last head! What elset could she do? Come back. We’ll talk things over.”

When they sighted the scattered Del Sol herd, its riders sitting loose, some of the men asleep in the saddle, the little pair of white carts made first objective for Nabours and his new-found friend.

The latter was not prepared for the vision of the tall young girl who rode out to meet them. Somber of eye, grave, sad, Anastasie Lockhart could no more deny her youth, her beauty, her heredity, her education, than she could negate the strong round figure, the clear skin and the mass of ruddy hair which first impressed this observer, not easily abashed, who now cast down his bridle rein and advanced on foot to meet her, broken hat in hand.

“Miss Lockhart, this is Mr. Dalhart, of Uvalde,” began Nabours. “He’s just above, with a rodeo of mixed stuff. He’s been on a cow hunt. He’s done found cows. I was purposing a few things. We come down to talk it over.”

Taisie Lockhart held out her hand in shy, stiff fashion that little comported with her inches or her masculine garb.

“I’m shore pleased to meet you, Miss Lockhart,” said the newcomer. He stood, a wild but not uncouth figure, a typical border man of that fierce and self-reliant land. “We have heard of Miss Lockhart as fur south as Uvalde,” he added.

When Taisie smiled, a small dimple, very feminine, quite often appeared on her left cheek. This now unsettled Dalhart’s reason utterly.

Nabours now briefly outlined the proposition of trading cows for beeves and making the herd more suitable for the trail. Taisie Lockhart nodded soberly, by no means ignorant of cows and cow methods.

“But now,” broke in Nabours presently, “Miss Taisie, I’ll have to get a new hand somehow, out of Mr. Dalhart’s outfit.”

“Yes? We—we lost one, sir.” Taisie’s voice was unsteady.

The cow hunter was, so it seemed, a simple man of direct habits.

“I rid down, Miss Lockhart,” said he, “to ast fer the job. Would ye take me? I kin ride and rope.”

His eyes, brown, direct, unabashed, looked fair and square into the dark eyes of Taisie Lockhart. She spread out her hands at length, with words of assent which might have had a double meaning:

“One more man? Very well.”

A Paramount Picture. North of 36.
TAISIE INVITES THE MYSTERIOUS McMASTERS IN.

CHAPTER XIII
“BRING AN IRON!”

THE cow hunter lost little time in settling down to work in his new capacity. He had initiative, seemed masterful, independent.

“Let me bring two or three of my boys down and help you-all throw back a lot of these cows and calfs. I’ll leave couple boys to hold our stuff. Come on up again and look it over.”

They rode together until they reached the edge of the wild range herd—literally the loot of a land untenanted—animals wild as buffalo. Nabours gave the herd the quick glance of the practiced cowman.

“Yore stuff’s fatter’n ours,” said he; “yet you’ve driv further.”

“Shore,” replied the other. “We’ve been on a eight-hundred-mile circle, like enough. Way out west, it’s high and dry, and the vine mesquite grass, or the grama north o’ that, curls down like nigger wool. There’s cows here been raised on vine mesquite, fat as Christmas ducks right now.

“I hearn tell that away fur up north, thousand miles er so, they got bunch grass and buffler grass that fats cows the same way; though, o’ course, no cow critter could live through them winters up north.”

“Shore not—nor no man, neither, I reckon.”

“Well, now, here’s the layout,” resumed Dalhart. “Here’s two-three thousand to pick from. As I said, you’ll find plenty T. L.’s. We got maybe three hunderd slicks here and there, fer ourselves. Ef we got a dollar a head straight through we’d be rich on the hunt. Yet beeves at Sumner and north o’ there is fotchin’ fifteen a head and up’ards.”

“Ef we got half that at the railroad my boss’d be rich on one drive,” said Jim Nabours. “Then we’d have money enough to locate the gang that’s been pushing stuff off this range. I don’t think we’ll need to scrape Austin very damn deep.”

“I ain’t sayin’,” replied the cow hunter quietly. “Now what I segest is that you-all cut yore light stuff and let our boys throw it back on yore range. Take out’n our herd as many head o’ good fours and drive ’em all north under the Fishhook, T. L.’s and all the rest. When you sell allow us a dollar a head for findin’ and tradin’. Does that sound fair?”

“More’n such,” said Jim Nabours. “This first herd is a expeariment for all of us. Let’s get the girl on her feet fer sake of her father. And him oncet rich!” he added. “As square a cowman as ever crossed leather. I tell you, that bunch of shorthorns that’s come into Austin done him dirt. Politics, that’s what’s under it—Reconstruction politics. They think they can steal this state because they win the war. Reconstruction? I’ll bet one thing, ef I ever lay eye on the man that’s been riding our range I’ll take him apart so’s’t he’ll be damned hard ever to reconstruck again!”

Now in the glare and heat and dust of the frank Southern spring days, two dozen lank, lithe riders split the two great herds, combed them both, blended them both. Nabours’ face began to lighten as he saw forming a real trail herd of marketable beeves and mature cows. Of the unknown potential market at the rails he really knew nothing. It might demand beef and might ask stocking cattle. The discards of each herd, the yearlings, the cows with calves, the lame and halt, were to be cut back south for the later distribution on their own home ranges.

The whole enterprise in which these two pastoral chiefs now by chance were engaged was one of a day now gone by forever, and it was conducted under standards not understandable to-day. There was no law but range custom. Texas was but thirty years this side the time when twenty enormous land grants, given to Americans, had covered practically all of her vast territory. No scale of cattle values ever had been known. On a strip of twenty-five miles here, not that many miles from the capital of the state, now were assembled almost ten thousand head of cattle. Had a buyer from the North appeared he could have bought the lot at three dollars and a half the head, and at the tally-out he would as a matter of course have been asked to accept the count as it ran, dogies, cows and ancient steers, head for head. In those days a cow was a cow. All horned kine, of any age or sex, were cows.

Again, as to the question of ownership, the gesture of the day was alike close and hard, or large and lenient. No man argued with his neighbor, since a cow was only a cow. A man gave his cloak also to his neighbor if asked—though woe to the man who laid hand on coat, uninvited!

In the herd of these wild-cow gatherers were many unbranded cattle—their own now by virtue of discovery, the custom being “finders, keepers,” as to an unmarked animal. For the mixed lot of the branded strays from widely scattered herds a dollar a head seemed then a fair pay for finding and herding for a hundred miles or more. The adventurers who had taken on this speculation of saddle and rope had rather considered a dollar a head profit than range the find into the second year—after which the increase of the strays would be their own without possible contest. And a dollar a head, payable perhaps next fall, was a thing large and golden to the eye of the bearded, half-clad fighting men who now, with no plan on their own part, had uncovered a large plane of contact of the old with the new, of the late past with a new and crowding present. But for both parties, cow hunters and trail drivers, it was all a speculation. The country north of them was an unknown land. No values yet were established either here or there. The West was yet in embryo.

But all the time, as Nabours and Dalhart, respective leaders, rode at their work, their wonder increased at what each learned from the other. Some malign intelligence, outrunning the apathy of the South in the post-bellum period, had worked on more than a local horizon. There had been a general pushing of the range product into unsettled West Texas, as far as the Comanches would admit. The trail to the Pecos River, up which cattle had been driven to Army posts, the pioneer work of Loving and Goodnight, the casual Western drives of the half-breed Jesse Chisholm to the Pecos crossing, must have been watched and known by certain powerful groups of the new and avid carpetbag politicians then crowding South.

That a covert range ring was working in Austin—as a beef ring later was to work in Washington—as well as a river-improvements ring which was hastening to sell or take over all the state lands at a few cents the acre; and that this sinister gang of far-sighted and unscrupulous men had visions of a day of a vast empire of their own, stocked with cattle which had cost no more than the stealing, branding and driving, could then be no more than suspected by Nabours or Dalhart. But both men were shrewd. Both knew wild ways and wild lands, and both knew cows, though neither had any real vision as to the swift future of cows. They knew that crooked work had been going on, of so large and so vicious an extent as to violate all the ancient and sacred law of custom, as well as the written law. Both men were sober as they rode at their work.

“And to think,” said the old foreman of Del Sol, “they wouldn’t spare even a girl like her!”

Dalhart, lean and bearded adventurer in cows, nodded.

“But there ain’t none like her!”

Nabours paused for a time.

“You been on our string three hours.”

“Three hours is enough, amigo. Three minutes was enough. I’ve never knowed such a woman could ever be in all the world.”

“There’s others think so.”

“I’m sorry for them.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to marry that girl ef hit’s the lastest thing I do.”

“Others has told me such,” replied Jim Nabours, not so much concerned. “It’s right funny about women. Now, I tried for all my early life to marry a girl down in San Felipe. I done right well, and was going to ast her; but another man done married her first. All right, he done it fair, and I didn’t kick. I set down to wait him out, and shore enough, he done die in about ten year and she was a widder. I begin to save up enough to git me new spurs and hat and saddle blankets, and allow to begin courting of Sarah right after branding time—and damn me, ef a Dutch colonist don’t up and marry her afore I git around to it! He last four year, and Sam Doan shot him one day over around Round Rock. I was in debt to Sam fer that, fer now Sarah was a widder oncet more.

“This time I didn’t lose no time. I rid over and told Sarah how it laid. ‘Why, law!’ says she. ‘Why Jim, I never knowed you choose to marry me, er of course I’d of married you rather’n ary one of them others! Why didn’t you say so?’

“ ‘Well, I say so now,’ says I. ‘Even ef I’m crowding forty-eight, I say so.’

“So we done set the day. And right then the war bust in our face and I rid off to the war. I sort of forgot to git married to Sarah, in the excitement. Well, when I come back I was apast fifty, and broke. When I came to look things up I find Sarah has married a Arkansaw widower with eight children over on the Brazos!

“That settled me with women. The game’s too damn rapid fer a man like me.”

“Well, it ain’t going to be too rapid fer me.”

“No? Now look here! Let me ast you something—and let me tell you something. I ast you—likewise I tell you.

“I’m that girl’s maw. I realize how much she owes every man on these both two herds right now, but I allow that the real men in this outfit has got to think of her cows and not her—first, last and all the time, till the said cows is sold.

“You willing to take left point on them grounds and with that understanding? No love making on this trail—not a damned word! Besides, you’ll tell me who you are, after we get done driving and settle down to courting?”

His keen eye sought that of Dalhart, whose own met it as fearlessly.

“It’s a trade!” said he. “I’ll keep my word on that.”

“Well, that’s settled. Now, let’s set off the branding gangs. We got to get at least four hunderd of these fours in the Fishhook before night day after to-morrow. That’ll keep us all from making love, I reckon. Blest be the tie that binds! But you’re a T. L. hand now, and not no more’n that. You got a naturalized citizen’s right to love the boss, but you ain’t reached no years of majority ner discretion this side of Aberlene.”

Jim Nabours rode back in the twilight and flung off from a foam-streaked horse at Taisie’s fire. The tall girl came and seated herself beside him on a bed roll, a hand laid on his knee.

“What’s wrong now?”

His quick eye noted her paleness. He knew she had been weeping. A large gnarled brown hand of his own stroked gently the slender brown hand on his knee.

“Why, Miss Taisie, ain’t nothing wrong, I’d say. Fact is, everything is too damned right, that’s all.”

He went on to tell her of the developments of the day; how more than richly their exchange of discards for beeves was working out; how well the herd was developing. Then he came to what was on his mind.

“Now, see here, Miss Taisie,” he went on, breaking a bit of bark between his fingers, “when we started out we thought we had stripped the Del Sol range. We taken all ages. Only a act of God could of kept us from having a plumb thousand calfs riding in yore carts. But now looky here! We’re going to cut back all that stuff and throw in fours instead. The cut is going back to Del Sol. But who’s going to take care of Del Sol while we go north?”

“Well, who could?”

“You could. Yes, Miss Taisie, you! We can git along damn well without you, and Del Sol can’t get along alone. Don’t you think you’d be safer back home that way than what you will be going north up to the sixth princerpul meridjun with sixteen pirates and God knows what kind of weather?

“You’re only a girl, Miss Taisie—the damnedest finest girl ever borned in Texas; but girls is girls. I can handle cows, Miss Taisie. I can’t handle girls. You go on back home, please ma’am. We’ll pull in afore Thanksgiving with a wagonload of Yankee money.”

The girl straightened up.

“I’ll not go back! I closed the doors when I started up the trail. How could I live there alone?”

“I ain’t ast you to live there alone. What I say is, we’ll be inside of ten miles of Austin when we cross the Colorado. I want you and Del to ride in to Austin and get married. Then I want you both to take charge of this cut and ride on back to Del Sol.”

The old man turned his gray grim eye to her.

“Can’t you leave me be yore maw, Taisie, child?”

“No—no—no, Jim!” Both her hands were on his. “Don’t ask me! I’ve nothing to live for outside of what’s here on the ground. Everything I own I’ve got with me, and all my friends. No, Jim, I’m going through. No use to argue—no use to argue, Jim!”

“I reckon not, ma’am,” said the old foreman, sighing. “All I say is, God ha’ mercy, that’s all! I got a dream there’s going to be hell on this herd.”

So was the genesis of Anastasie Lockhart, cow hand. To-morrow came a creature who rode unconscious of the horse beneath her, scornful of heat and dust as any of these dust-screened figures, scarf over mouth, legs clinging, body rhythmic, hands swift at the test moment; a creature of incredible fascination, with all the velocity and vitality of youth and strength. And before her, seeking respite of her in violent activities, passed vague, flitting, heroic figures, each of whom rode his best for her—and each of whom eke left to the tears of the recording angel crimes in cattle brands they would have lost a hand before committing for their own gain or that of any man.

A vast picture, and a noble, that of the remaking of the Del Sol trail herd. A shrouded yellow sun, hot and again hot. The dulled green of a landscape of timber and grass, of hill and valley, a wild land even then, though under the eaves of the state’s capitol; a land partly settled here, but tenanted under no real acceptance of a social compact. Eager, early, primeval it was—all. Youth of the world!

A tossing sea of wide-pointed horns, overhung with a cloud of dust. Rattling and clacking inside the dust. Rock of Ages; Jesus, Lover; Home, Sweet Home, where lean riders held the mill. And always, cutting through the cloud, one remorseless rider after another edged his chosen victim out for the final rush and the relentless sweep of the thin hide rope. Over and over again, more than five hundred times before that cut was done—twenty times, twenty-five in an hour, counting them all—the little Southern horses sat down and quarter-faced their quarry, each taking his own weight and more in one wrench at his saddle horn and saddle cinches, his gleaming eyes noting the hurled horned creature, his victim also, at the other end of the rope.

Calls of “Bring an iron!” And men sweating at a half dozen fires were ready for that. Till his trembling sides could no longer hold his great heart’s purpose, each savage little horse went back into the dust under a savage man. Two ropes for the heavy steers, two sweating horses; twenty-five brands run in an hour, perhaps—a task for four days done in two.

A vast and splendid picture, and of a great day. Since then two million men and women have mated thereabouts. Yet now, center of that picture—and its cause—there passed, hour after hour, gray, dusty, flitting, tireless, the unmistakable and unconcealable figure of a young woman. . . . Yes, a creature of incredible vitality and velocity, of life and youth.

Youth of the world!

CHAPTER XIV
A STRANGE ERRAND

DAN McMASTERS, sheriff of Gonzales and captain of state Rangers, rode into the straggling village of Austin, capital of a state so large a horseman could not cross it in a month. He bore no outward evidence of having passed through any agitating scenes. His apparel evinced no sign of disorder, his face was coldly emotionless as ever. He might have been almost any tall and well-clothed young man. One thing only set him apart from the usual visitor: By virtue of his calling he wore his two heavy six-shooters. The handle of the left-hand gun pointed forward; that of the right-hand weapon to the rear—a puzzling combination to any student of possibilities. Granted that he was a left-handed man, which hand would first seek a weapon? Or if right-handed, which? That was a problem which, lacking time, some half dozen men had never solved to their own success.

A certain red-faced, gray-haired and rather rotund individual active in the office of the treasurer of the commonwealth of Texas, sitting before a low-topped desk in a room of the building which served as state capitol, looked up as the newcomer entered.

“Good evening, sir,” said McMasters pleasantly. “Do I find Mr. Rudabaugh in?”

The official made no immediate response.

“You do not,” said he finally.

“No? I infer that he is out of town?”

“Yes,” rejoined the other.

McMasters smiled innocently.

“In such case he is no longer in jail?”

At this the official displayed feeling.

“What business is it of yours?” he demanded. “And how do you know he is in jail? He didn’t stay there longer than it took to call court. There are not people enough in Texas to keep Mr. Rudabaugh in jail.”

“I heard that a deputy United States marshal took him and his party the other day, below the Colorado, and sent him in with a force of Rangers. As you say, it might have been supposed that no court in this town would hold him.”

The red-faced official abated somewhat of his pompousness.

“From what I’ve heard in description, I believe you are Mr. McMasters, sheriff of Gonzales,” said he presently.

“I am that same, sir,” replied McMasters smilingly. “If I needed to quote Davy Crockett, I might say that I have the closest shooting rifle and the best coon dog in the whole state of Texas. Yes, I’m McMasters of Gonzales.”

“Well,” began the other, embarrassed, “it’s only right to tell you that at the preliminary hearing all those men were discharged.”

“That is why I called. I wanted to talk things over with Mr. Rudabaugh. I thought I might be able to explain one or two things to him. I thought maybe I might be of some use to him.”

Silence of the other, now afraid to speak.

“Where can I find Mr. Rudabaugh?” The quiet voice took a new note.

“That I can’t answer. He left town again yesterday morning, with some other gentlemen. They headed west.”

“It looks as though Mr. Rudabaugh thinks I still am after him. Perhaps he has been mistaken about my motives and purposes with him. Perhaps he forgets that my father voted and worked against slavery, the same as the gentlemen of your party did. Why antagonize Gonzales? Why fight the Rangers?

“Now, what I want to tell Mr. Rudabaugh is this: I know where that trunk of Texas land scrip is to-day. I am ready to tell him where it is.”

The official coughed, embarrassed.

“That was what he wanted to get hold of at Del Sol. Well, I got hold of it myself. I know where it is to-day. I can take him to it at any time he likes. Does that sound interesting?”

The red-faced man sat up.

“It sounds strange, coming from you!”

“Well, there are times when it’s hard to get the truth. I never found much use in showing all my own hand in public. A peace officer has to be careful. Perhaps the state treasurer has misunderstood me. Perhaps I am willing to work with him for a little time, and not against him. How then?”

“Mr. Rudabaugh and his associates, too, have been very much misunderstood by the people of Texas,” began the state official. “He is a man of large ideas, a man of vision. Our friends of the other party prefer to see Texas remain as she always has been—remote, impoverished, with no commercial outlook, no hope on earth. Mr. Rudabaugh sees a wider future for Texas. We all do here.” He spoke virtuously.

“Precisely! Well, I’m one of the growing number of Texans who’d agree with him on that last. We don’t deny that there are chances in land and cows such as we never dreamed. The men who work fast in Texas now will be rich—as rich as they like. But we can’t always climb up on the housetop and tell all the world about the means and methods. Of course, that means that some may misunderstand such men as Mr. Rudabaugh. You know that?”

“Why, yes, of course; I know the way Mr. Rudabaugh himself works—always decisive, never telling much of his plans. His friends deplore the criticism he has received in certain quarters.”

“Yes, he has occasion to be cautious. Still, if Mr. Rudabaugh, not as state treasurer but as president of a certain land-and-cattle company, has any wish to confer with the man who saw him arrested the other day, when he was inquiring about a certain block of additional land scrip, that man is willing to talk with him now. We might find something of mutual interest. You-all here in Austin might do worse than make friends down Gonzales way.”

McMasters smilingly waved a hand at either gun.

“I’m not quite alone. We will both have to come under a white flag. If he wants to be muy amigo, maybe I can be of service to him.”

His gray eyes, now narrowed, were fixed without wavering upon those of this other man.

“Tell me, where is Sim Rudabaugh!” he demanded suddenly. The man behind the desk started as though under an immediate menace.

“Well, since you seem to offer your aid, Mr. McMasters, in a misunderstanding—a very deplorable misunderstanding—I presume I may tell you. He’s gone north, up the trail, toward the Brazos. He’s on some private business of his own.”

“Yes? He’s in camp, waiting for the big Del Sol herd? Where is his camp?”

The desk man grew very uneasy; but at length he replied hesitantly: “Well, I’d take the trail that runs due north from San Marcos if I had to find him. I would say he might be camped a ride of a day and a half north of here—say, thirty to fifty miles north, on the general road to Fort Worth village.

“You don’t know where that herd is, do you?” he added. “Mr. Rudabaugh regards its going north as a very grave mistake; indeed, a risky and ruinous thing for the state at just this time. You don’t know where the herd is now?”

“Yes, I do know. I’ve just come from it. It’s been held up a few days in west of here. They may get over the Colorado by to-day. I ought to be able to find Mr. Rudabaugh well in advance of the herd itself, then, you think?”

“But you didn’t tell me where the scrip is.” The other man flushed at seeing his eagerness noted.

“Well,” said McMasters slowly, “you yourself and I myself are not supposed to know a damned thing about that chest of papers, are we? But we do, eh? Well, when we find the T. L. cows we will come pretty near finding that scrip. And scrip is going up, eh?

“Oh, I’ll tell you this much, my friend. I know all about the moves of Mr. Rudabaugh’s big company to get holdings west toward the edge of the Staked Plains—on the Double Mountain Fork and above there. You see? Well, I don’t see why you and I should beat about the bush. I know all about the operations that have driven almost all the central range’s holdings on out farther west.

“There are a lot of things I know. Well, do you think I am safe to trust? And don’t you think the administration might do worse than be friendly to Gonzales and Uvalde?”

The other man drew himself up with a long sigh of doubt, apprehension, but made an attempt at merriment.

“Well,” said he, “of course, this is the first time we’ve met. I don’t know that I’d trust you to take care of me, but I believe I’d trust you to take care of yourself.”

“I always have,” said McMasters simply. “That’s why I’m here now. Suppose you and I have a little war council, eh?”

When McMasters walked his horse down the long street of Austin town, rifle under leg, he looked neither to the right nor to the left, though well aware of the scrutiny which followed him from more than one door and window. The reputation of the mysterious, always restless sheriff of Gonzales, captain of the newly revived state constabulary, was one that reached beyond the confines of his own county. No one had looked for him in Austin—to the contrary. But then, as one man said to a neighbor, McMasters, of Gonzales, could always be counted on to be doing some unaccountable thing.

CHAPTER XV
NORTHWARD HO!

THE reconstructed and augmented Del Sol herd passed on northward steadily, as though impelled by some cosmic force. It had required well-nigh a week to cut the two herds and blend them into one, for handling heavy beeves in the open is vastly different from the work of the corral and branding chute on light cattle. At the end of the work the remuda was dragged and drooping, the men yet more taciturn. But they could look out with pride over well-nigh four thousand head of longhorns such as would make any cowman’s eye brighten even in that day.

Now, daily more accustomed to the trail, the cattle shook down to the daily march. At dawn they did not feed at first; but, never urged to speed, in an hour or two would graze along, halting in the march, advancing, the concourse at times stretched out over more than a mile, perhaps a quarter that distance in width. At midday, thrown off the trail—if trail it could be called which as yet had never known a herd—they grazed well, and in that portion of the country could find water two or three times a day; so that they took on or held flesh rather than lost it.

“Did ary one of you-all ever hear how far it is to Aberlene?” asked Nabours of his new man, Dalhart, whom he had put on point in view of his obvious education as a cowman.

“Must be e’en around about a plumb thousand miles,” replied the latter. “Hope hit’s thisaway all the ways—plenty of grass and the rivers full enough fer water right along. We ain’t had to hunt water yet. You’d orto see the Llano! We’ve driv two days, out yan, with their tongues hangin’ out.

“Water! When we hit the Colorado I thought we got plenty water. She’ll swim a horse in a dry year, and she swum us for more’n a hundred fifty yards! I was mighty glad to ferry them carts.

“Uh-huh. Ner that ain’t all—the Brazos’ll do the same, and only luck’ll save us from swimmin’ a quarter mile, maybe, on the Red. Then beyond that’s the Washita, narrer but deep. I never talked with no man that ever was north of the Chickasaws. We’ll wet our saddles plenty, shore. What cows we don’t drownd and the Injuns don’t steal, or that don’t get lost in night runs—why, that’s what we’ll have to sell. Four thousand’s a big herd to han’le—too big—but I’ve gethered cows long enough to know a feller better git plenty when the chancet comes.”

North of the first unbridged river—the Colorado—the advance was over a country practically new, although now subdivided into organized counties. The main thrust of the early population was from the south and lower east, so that now the farther north they got the sparser grew the infrequent settlements. All North and Northwest Texas remained terra incognita even for Texans, and no map of it ever had been made, let alone of the wild Indian Territory that lay north of it. The thousands of longhorns, the first herd ever to go north from a point so far south in Texas, plodded along, never turning a backward foot, but hourly finding a new land. Austin was a county-seat town rather than a capitol city. Such communities as Temple, Waco, Cleburne, Fort Worth—all close to the ninety-eighth meridian, along which lay the general course of the first of the cattle drives before the trails moved west—were cities in embryo; Fort Worth, through which bodily the trail ran, had then not over one hundred inhabitants; enough for a metropolis in a state that had not a hundred miles of rails and no trace of a lasting market for the one great commodity—cows.

Across a half dozen counties, a dozen lesser streams, the singular procession passed onward, epochal, in an abysmal ignorance and a childlike self-confidence. Its course was due north; and since now the grass was good and water courses full, it needed to make no digressions. The herd left a trail a hundred yards wide, two hundred, half a mile; but the main road remained written plainly for any who might follow.

Nabours was cowman enough not to crowd his cattle on a march of such indefinite duration, but continually he fretted over the necessary slowness of the journey.

“It’s good country,” he admitted to Del Williams; “can’t complain; grass all right; high enough, but not washed out; and a good creek every forty rod almost. But I never did know Texas was so big. Here we are into May, and when we make the Brazos we’ll be only maybe a hunderd and fifty mile north of where we started at. It’ll be anyways a hunderd years afore we make Aberlene, ef there is any such place, which I doubt, me. Not one of us knows nothing, and nary one has ever been even up here afore. We’ll just about hit the Red when she’s up full.”

“We ain’t there yit,” rejoined his new point man cheerfully. “We may all git drownded in the Brazos; an’ ef we do we won’t need worry none about the Red.”

They had not yet lost all touch with the settlements; indeed, continually crossed the great pastures of men who under range custom held their own river fronts and range. Now and again a sort of trace led them north—the compass finger of fate always pointed north and not west for the state of the Lone Star. But of actual road there was none, fences were undreamed and bridges never yet had been held needful for traveling man. When, therefore, they struck the great Brazos, coming down as did all these upper rivers from the east rim of the mysterious Llano Estacado, it was relief to Nabours to find a pair of rough boats which he fancied he could lash together into ferriage for his troublesome carts and their timid passengers. For the herd a swimming crossing once more was necessary, and demand was made once more on the native generalship of the foreman.

“Put ’em in warm, men,” he said to his men at the camp fire in a great arm of the river. “Ef a cow’s warm and the sun’s shining he’ll take the water easy. Ef he’s chilly he begins to think of home and mother. We’ll rest ’em here till late to-morrer morning. The bank’s highest on the south side and we can throw ’em in easy. I don’t think there’s more’n a hunderd yards or so of swimming, no ways.”

His judgment proved good for an amateur—as all trail drovers then were. Well warmed, the herd strung into the ford amiably enough, led by the point men and pushed by the swings. The horse herd already had been crossed, for horses swim better than cattle, and have more courage at a wide crossing; and this laid down the line for the herd leaders, who went in readily enough.

The long line of the cattle, as it reached the swimming channel, was swept down stream in a deep U, but when they caught footing and made up the farther bank the line was established and the crossing went on steadily, the line never broken and not a head lost out of the great total. It went forward as though in an accustomed routine; and this first successful essay in crossing big water gave confidence to all.

All the saddle horses, including Blancocito, had to swim, and so did the yoke oxen of the carts. The owner of the herd patiently waited her turn. Old Anita crossed herself for two solid hours, sure her end had come. Milly found her relief in loud and tearful lamentations.

“What ever brung us-all ’way up yere?” she exclaimed. “My folks wuz Baptists, and so’m me; but what I says is, I done been baptized oncet and dat’s plenty. I’m a notion to walk back home.”

“No you won’t,” said the trail boss, who with his best man had come back to see to this last work. “You and Anita set right on yore cart seats. Miss Taisie’ll take care of you. Ef you drownd we can get plenty better cooks, so don’t you worry. Ef you did float off, you couldn’t sink noways. Anita’s the one in danger—she’s all bones. You set in the middle and say yore prayers like Anita does.

“Don’t you worry none, ma’am,” he added, addressing Taisie. “I’m going to take them two John boats somebody has left here and make a raft that’s safer than a bridge.”

His process gave proof of the Texan’s strange distrust in all boats and confidence in all horses, although it showed no less the resourcefulness of the real explorer, crossing country with such means as lay at hand.

It was no great matter to rope the two broad-horn scows together side and side, and to lay a pole platform across to receive the carts, which were run on by hand. Remained the question of propulsion, and none of these knew aught of sail or pole or oars. This meant falling back on the vade mecum—the horse, without which in his day the railroads and bridges might as well never have been.

Nabours lashed his cart wheels fast to his craft, so that he could risk strain on them. Then he got a long pole, some thirty feet in length. All the time singing and whistling to himself, and vouchsafing no answer to any, he passed this across the body of the foremost cart and lashed it fast. The ends projected widely at each side.

“I got a steamboat now,” said he to his followers, “but I ain’t got no side paddle wheels. Ride in there, you points—Dalhart, and you, Del—you’re side wheels. When you get under the ends, each of you reach up and tie yore saddle horn to the end of the pole. Then swim back yoreselfs. The horses couldn’t sink ef they wanted to, and I don’t reckon there’s only one way they can swim, and that’s acrost.”

Theirs not to reason why, the two men obeyed, managing to get into the boat, which still lay aground, the side-wheel horses standing not over belly deep, each encouraged by its rider, who lay along the gunwale anxiously. But when at length the thing was put to the test by bodily pushing the clumsy contrivance into the current, the unique experiment proved a success. The horses, finding themselves carried off their feet, began to swim vigorously, their instinct or their intelligence leading them to head angling upstream. The result was that the craft, even thus heavily loaded, made astonishing headway; indeed, finding a landing just below the ford end established by the herd. With shouts and laughter the remaining men once more swam their horses over in the wake. The crossing, so novel that even Taisie forgot her fears, was made with expedition and in perfect safety.

“It’s easy,” said Jim Nabours, modestly answering the compliments of his men. “Of course, ef ’twasn’t for the womenfolks we wouldn’t have to bother. A feller couldn’t keep house without a horse, could he? Ain’t nothing a horse and a rope can’t do. My horse swum me over twicet, and didn’t hardly wet the saddle to the tops of the rosaderos. There ain’t nothing safe as a horse, ma’am.

“Now you men go on and string ’em out”—he turned to his well-wetted associates. “They’re all over and all ready to move. It’s a dandy crossing. We’ll bed three or four miles on, if it looks good. Feed ’em slow and get ’em full. A full belly’s the best way to handle a cow. I’ll push on ahead right soon.”

Just now he rode over to the moody figure that sat her reclaimed horse at the upper side of the fording trail. His face was frowning.

“Miss Taisie,” said he, “one thing I’ve got to tell you. There ain’t going to be two trail bosses on this herd. It’s you or me. Now I want to say that we can’t be over about thirty of forty mile from Fort Worth. I reckon you and Del can get married there, huh? Then you still could ride back home to Del Sol. I don’t know what there is ahead. We ain’t more’n started. I can take chances for myself, and men and my cows—but not for you!”

“Jim! Why, Jim!” She laid a hand on his soaked sleeve. “You don’t think I’m a quitter, do you?”

“Lord knows I don’t, ma’am! I wisht you was.”

“Jim! The lone herd of Del Sol, the first out of Texas? Something big, Jim! I don’t think I’ll be scared any more. It wouldn’t be playing square with you-all to get married and go back home. . . . Home?”

He turned quickly. Tears again were on the girl’s cheeks. With a savage groan he caught the cheek strap of Blancocito and led her to the vehicles.

“You Milly, damn yore black Baptist hide, quit yore shouting and build a fire! Make some coffee for Miss Taisie. I’ll tell Sinker to hold the remuda back, Miss Taisie. You-all come on up then.”

Presently Cinquo Centavos rode up, shy and grinning, abashed yet happy at being appointed personal guardian of his deity. Thin, burned brown, ragged, his hat almost no hat at all, boots and saddle alone marked him worthy to join these other men—these and his instinctive mastery of horseflesh. At sight of Milly clambering down over the cart wheel—indeed a dismaying spectacle—his mount began to plunge and pitch. The boy sat him, annoyed. Taisie waved a hand.

“Fine, Cinquo!” she called. “I like to see you ride.”

The boy smiled as he jerked up the head of the horse.

“I didn’t make him pitch, ma’am,” said he. “He’s jest done that hisself. I reckon it was the sight o’ Milly’s laigs. He’s all right now.” He dismounted.

“How are you coming on, Cinquo?” inquired his mistress. “Getting to be a regular trail man?”

“I ain’t lost a head yit, ma’am,” said the youth simply. “One D Slash hawse turned back this mornin’, but I crossed him. I got my hull bunch. Now we’re over two-three rivers; they won’t turn back now. Hawses is a heap reasonabler than cows.”

“Jim says you work too hard. You don’t need to be up all night on a remuda, he says—horses stick together. You don’t have to watch them every minute.”

“Shore they do, ma’am. You don’t bed ’em and tuck ’em in like you do cows. I wouldn’t be no cowman,” superiorly. “Gimme two-three weeks on the trail,” he added eagerly, “I wouldn’t hatter watch so hard, like now. They feed against the wind, ma’am. I got the bell on that big white Del Sol mare. I allus listen which way the bell is soundin’, and so I allus know where they’re at: Why, sleep? I slep’ most a hour last night. When I don’t hear the bell I wake up. It’s easy if you savvy hawses. I ain’t gwine to lose nary head, to Aberlene, ma’am.” He colored deeply. “I—well, I ain’t, now!”

“I’ve got all good men, Cinquo,” said his deity. “They savvy cows and savvy horses.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The boy’s throat gulped.

“Have some coffee, Cinquo,” said Taisie. “Milly, give Cinquo something to eat. He hasn’t lost a head.”

Seated comfortably on the ground, Cinquo grew more confident.

“Ma’am, ain’t the nights han’some?” he ventured. “So bright, quiet-like. Times, I lay on the groun’ by my hawse; come midnight, I kin hear the bell, and hear my hawses blow, nighest ones; er sometimes hear the cows grunt and blow, too, bellies full and right contented. So all the world’s kind o’ happy-like. And the stars is so fine, ma’am! Don’t you think so? Like glass, they air. Seems like God must ’a’ busted a winderpane and slammed the pieces right up agin the sky, and they stuck there, shinin’ like they was wet.”

“Yes, Cinquo. So you’ve noticed the stars too?”

“Then we both do!” he exulted. His young, shy eyes shone. Indeed, he was her knight, ready to risk all in her honor. So were his nights borne, sleepless in ardor and reverence.

“Stahs!” broke in Milly. “Stahs! They’s common! I know whaffur I go Nawth—I gwine to git me a apple! Onliest apple I ever done et,” she explained, “were what Sher’f McMasters gimme. He taken it out’n his saddle pocket and said would I eat it? ‘Mister Sher’f,’ says I, ‘what setch a thing like disher cost now?’ says I. ‘Oh, it mout ’a’ costed fifty cents,’ says he, ‘’cludin’ of freight.’ ‘Huh,’ says I, ‘ef it cost fifty cent, I reckon Ah gwine to stahve on, stahve on!’ But some time, ef ever I git Nawth, and ever I git whah apples is at, an’ ain’t nobody a-lookin’—u-m-m—huh! Now, Mr. Dan McMasters, he sayed——”

“Go get my horse, Cinquo!” broke in Taisie Lockhart imperatively. “Milly, pack the dishes. Come, we must get on!”

A Paramount Picture. North of 36.
“WHAT ARE YOU—FRIEND OR FOE?” DEMANDS JIM NABOURS.

CHAPTER XVI
IN THE NIGHT

THAT night the stars, indeed, almost tallied with Cinquo’s description in their pointed brilliances. The wind was nothing now, the silence, save for a few quavering coyotes, was deep and full of peace. Contentment sat on the wild bivouac. On a gentle slope well-nigh four thousand cattle were lying close packed in a vast oval, less than a fifth of a mile in extent, half that distance across on the lesser axis. Bedded on high, dry grass, in the path of the breeze, themselves full of grass and water, they lay, heads high, level with their cover, blowing and chewing, eyes closed and happy.

The fire points of the cook’s evening meal now barely showed. Afar came the faint sound of men’s voices, singing—the night watch riding slowly, two men in one direction, two in the opposite, fifty feet or so back from the bedded animals. These latter in some vague way knew they were protected. They lay and grunted dully, having ended one more day of their march toward fate.

“Ain’t that enough to make a cowman happy?” said Nabours to Del Williams, nodding toward the herd as they lolled by the fading fire. “You couldn’t kick ’em up.”

“We ain’t started yet, Jim,” said the young Texan.

“How come we ain’t? It couldn’t be much over four hunderd mile to Red River Station from Del Sol. Them cows is plumb gentle already.

“I’m going to roll in, Del. You and Dalhart better go on at midnight, I reckon. Watch the Dipper.”

Afar, at the established distance from the watchers, the tiny fire at Taisie’s tent fell flickering into absorption by the night. Taisie lay, wide-eyed, looking out through the tent front at the myriad-pointed sky. She told herself that it was the coffee taken late, but she knew that was not why she did not sleep. Or, if she slept, she wakened always with the picture before her of a ring of men, one facing her, his eyes calm, although he was being tried on the point of honor dearest to any man. It was worse than trying him for his life, she knew that. Had she, Portia, provocateur général, judge, jury, been just?

Restless, confined by the oppression of the tent, Taisie drew her blankets beyond the flaps and tried the open air. Came the stertorous sounds of Milly’s sleep, the cough of the few animals picketed near by. She raised on elbow and looked to the tiny row of brush, piled as windbreak by old Sanchez. He and his wife Anita always slept so, with one scant serape above them. But they slept. She could not sleep.

She raised higher on her elbow, looked up at a sudden sound. Blancocito was standing, ears pointed toward the fringe of mesquite that flanked their little eminence. He had flung up his head, snorting. She turned, would have risen, for she was a fearless soul and reared on the border. Could it be Indians?