“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!