“Come along here, Miss Taisie,” he continued, inviting her to take a seat beside him on the grass and spreading down a crumpled sheet of brown paper. It held what cannot be bought to-day for any money—a more or less precise map of the first old cow trail from Texas north, although only his rude amateur hand had drawn it. The clumsy finger of the trail boss pointed out to his employer their locality as near as he himself could guess it.
“Dan McMasters and me talked this over afore he quit us,” he explained. “I’ve drawed it the best I could, and it’s sort of helpful too. Near as I can figure it, we’re just about to cross thirty-six north. My pap told me that thirty-six-thirty was where slavery ended and the damn Yankees begun.”
“Yes; the Missouri Compromise,” nodded Taisie.
“Anyways my pap told me that thirty-six, along in there, was about where cotton wouldn’t grow so well nohow, and where the ticks probably would fall offen the cows in the wintertime. The line must come right about here.”
“What line?” demanded Len Hersey, who was listening in and who now bent over the rude map curiously. “I kep’ a clost look all the time we’ve been on the trail, an’ so fur from seein’ any thirty-six lines atween here and where we all started, I ain’t seen nary line a-tall.”
“They ain’t marked on the ground, man,” replied his leader gently; “it’s only on the paper. But what can I expect of a boy raised on squirrel and corn pone, like you was? Yes, sir; thirty-six is just in and around right here.”
He made on this soiled paper a little cross, using a gnawed stub of a pencil which in its time had tallied perhaps a hundred thousand cows.
“There ain’t no moss on the trees no more,” mused Len. “The grass ain’t the same here. My law! did you ever see so many greenhead flies in your borned days as we’ve had all the way from the Red River north? And as for mosquitoes, Miss Lockhart,” he added, “a feller don’t darst get his arms out of his blankets at night.”
He looked ruefully at his elbows, entirely visible through the sleeves of his only shirt.
“Like enough a man could make some corn up here,” mused Jim Nabours, sagely, looking around him over the rolling prairie. “He couldn’t raise no cows; it’d be too cold. No, nor of course he couldn’t raise no cotton. Well it’s a right purty country; but can’t never be settled, even if the Osages was gone.”