Made in U. S. A.

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[CHAPTER I—THE GENESIS OF TROUBLE]

Who was it, I wonder, made that sagacious remark about the road to hell being paved with good intentions? He might have added an amendment to the effect that there’s always a plentiful supply of material for that much travelled highway. We all contribute, more or less. I know I have done so. And so did my people before me. My father’s intentions were good, but he didn’t live long enough to carry them out. If he hadn’t fallen a victim to an inborn streak of recklessness, a habit of taking chances,—well, I can’t say just how things would have panned out. I’m not fatalist enough to believe that we crawl or run or soar through our allotted span of years according to some prearranged scheme which we are powerless to modify. Oh, no! It’s highly probable, however, that if my father and mother had lived I should have gone into some commercial pursuit or taken up one of the professions. Either way, I should likely have pegged along in an uneventful sort of way to the end of the chapter—lots of men do. Not that I would have taken with enthusiasm to chasing the nimble dollar for the pure love of catching it, but because I was slated for something of the sort, and as the twig is bent so is the tree inclined; a man can’t sit down and twiddle his thumbs and refuse to perform any useful act, because there is no glory in it. The heroic age has gone a-glimmering down the corridors of time.

As it happened, my feet were set in other paths by force of circumstances. Only for that the sage-brush country, the very place where I was born might have remained a terra incognita. I should always have felt, though, that I’d missed something, for I was ushered into this vale of tears at the Summer ranch on the Red River of the South. Sumner here hadn’t developed into a cow monarch those days, but he was on the way. My earliest impressions were all of log and ’dobe buildings, of long-horned cattle, of wild, shaggy-maned horses, and of wilder men who rode the one and drove the other in masterly fashion. For landscape there was rolling prairie, and more rolling prairie beyond; and here and there the eternal brown of it was broken by gray sage-grown flats and stretches of greasewood—as if Nature had made a feeble effort to break the monotony. I knew only this until I was big enough to tease for a pony. I cannot remember seeing a town when I was small. The world to me was a place of great plains, very still, and hot, and dry, a huddle of cabins, and corrals, and a little way to the south Red River slinking over its quicksands—except in time of storm; then it raged.

So that when my father bundled mother and myself off to a place called St. Louis, where great squadrons of houses stood in geometrical arrangement over a vast area, I had already begun to look upon things with the eyes of cattleland. I recollect that when we were settled in a roomy, old-fashioned house I cried because my mother would not let me go out to the corral and play.

“There are no corrals in a city, dear,” she explained—and I cried the harder. I could conceive of no joy in a place where I could not go out to the corrals and have some brown-faced cowpuncher hoist me up on a gentle horse and let me hold the reins while the pony moved sedately about.

Left to himself, I think my father would have made a cowman of me, but mother had known the range when it was a place to try the nerves of strong men, and she hated it. I didn’t know till I was nearly grown that she had made dad promise when I was born that if the cattle made money for us, I should never know the plains. She came of an old Southern family, and her life had been a sheltered one till she met and married Jack Sumner. And she would have had me walk in pleasant places, as the men of her family had done—doctors, lawyers, planters, and such. The life was too hard, too much of an elemental struggle, she said—and I was to be saved some of the knocks that my dad had taken in the struggling years. Poor mother mine—her son was the son of his father, I’m afraid. But Sumner pere made good on his promise when the Sumner herds fattened his bank account sufficiently; and I gyrated through school, with college and a yet-to-be-determined career looming on the horizon.

So my childish memories of the great open, that lies naked to the sun-glare and the chilling breath of the northers year on year, grew fainter and more like something of which I had dreamed. Dad would come home occasionally, stay a day or two, perhaps a week, sometimes even a month; but my mother never went west of the Mississippi—nor did I. I often plagued them to let me go to the ranch during vacation, but they evidently considered it best to keep me away from the round-ups and horse-breaking and such, till I was old enough to see that there was another side to the life besides the sunshiny, carefree one that makes an irresistible appeal to a youngster.