Chapter VIII.
LEARNING TO ROPE WILD STEERS.
Arriving on the Navadad river, we went to work gathering a herd of "trail" beeves and also branding Mavricks at the same time. Some days we would brand as high as three or four hundred Mavricks—none under two years old.
After about a month's hard work we had the herd of eleven hundred ready to turn over to Mr. Black who had bought them, delivered to him at the Snodgrass ranch. They were all old mossy horn fellows, from seven to twenty-seven years old.
Mr. Black was a Kansas "short horn" and he had brought his outfit of "short horn" men and horses, to drive the herd "up the trail."
Some of the men had never seen a Texas steer, consequently they crossed Red river into the Indian territory with nothing left but the "grub" wagon and horses. They had lost every steer and Mr. Black landed in Kansas flat broke.
Lots of the steers came back to their old ranges and Mr. "Shanghai" had the fun of selling them over again, to some other greeny, may be.