“Funny how time changes,” he went on, lolling on his saddle horn as he spoke. “When my pap moved into Ulvade County cows wasn’t worth nothing. The only thing to do was to kill them for their hides, and if you got four bits for a hide that was big money. Lately people got a dollar apiece fer hides. I wouldn’t be surprised ef we got two dollars a hide in Aberlene. We’ll like enough have to sell ’em fer the hides. Ain’t no money in cows.
“I was on a herd oncet that driv to Shreveport time of the war. We got into cockleburs so heavy the cows’ tails got like clubs. They’d hung up by the tails in the piney woods over in Louisiana. You could hear ’em bawl bloody murder. I don’t know how many we left hanging in the piney woods. There wasn’t no money in that drive and the cows got thin as rails. We couldn’t even skin ’em.”
“Huh!” commented the older man. “The longer you live the nearer you’ll come to learning how many things can happen to folks that trails cows, son. Give us two or three more acts of God on this drive, and we’ll be lucky ef we hit Aberlene with fifty head of cows to skin. We-all may have to sell our saddles to get home.”
“Then I wouldn’t get no new shirt?”
“I ain’t promising you none.”
“Well,” said Len Hersey philosophically, reaching in a pocket for loose tobacco, “so long’s a man has got his spurs he don’t need a thousand shirts nohow. I don’t see nothing to worry about.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
THIRTY-SIX
ONE delay after another, one disaster with another, the Del Sol adventurers now were far into their second month on the trail. The summer was approaching, although they had as yet made scarce more than three-fourths of their entire distance to the railroad. Day after day they advanced over a wholly unsettled country that lay for nearly its entire length between the more settled civilized tribes on the east and the buffalo range toward the west. Clinging in their wavering line fairly close to the ninety-eighth meridian, without a guide, watch, calendar or compass, they now had reached a region beautiful as a wilderness, but soon to be the seat of a later and undreamed civilization.
They had been in wilderness practically all the way. At that time Austin was little more than a straggling country town. The herd cast dust into the one street of Fort Worth, then boasting not over one hundred inhabitants; and that was the last of the upper Texas towns. But what a line of cities was to follow their path on ninety-eight!
In the Indian Nations they had crossed the Washita, where now stands the thriving town of Chickasha, Oklahoma. El Reno, of Oklahoma, was grassland then, near the ford of the North Fork of the Canadian. Kingfisher was not dreamed of on the trail from the North Fork to the Cimarron; and beyond that the city of Enid was to wait until long after cattle days were gone and the cattle trail had moved itself much farther to the west. Above them they aimed for Caldwell, just across the Kansas line then but a ragged frontier town. Thence the wagon tongue pointed toward Wichita, when Wichita was hardly more than a furrow in the ground, “a mile long and an inch wide.” A railroad was still unforeseen in any of these vicinities in 1867; but railroads soon were to follow, almost in the footsteps of the earliest herd to Abilene. So much, to make understandable the exultation of these men as they discovered for themselves a country, or a succession of countries, absolutely virgin so far as the white man was concerned; a pastoral empire that never has had a parallel.