Two men of the crowd who had been listening quietly stepped out at the door, looking at one another but not speaking. They passed close at hand; the future town marshal of Abilene and his deputy.
A Paramount Picture. North of 36.
RUDABAUGH (NOAH BEERY) AND DAN McMASTERS (JACK HOLT).
CHAPTER XXXVIII
ALAMO ARRIVES
FOR the last two hundred miles of the long trail up from Texas, life was less eventful for the Del Sol men. The cattle now were shaken down to the daily routine of marching and gave little or no trouble. They took the smaller streams almost in their stride; and as to the last large waterway, no problem of note existed, for at the Arkansas River, the trail maker, Jesse Chisholm, again had provided passage in the scow he had left moored not far from Wichita after it had served his own purposes. It was merely a procession north of the Arkansas to Abilene, across beautifully undulating country whose attractiveness would have been hard to match in all America.
Arrived now at the Solomon River, however, almost at the environs of Abilene, they found that civilization had prepared a bridge—the first and only bridge of the entire journey of perhaps a thousand miles. It was a structure of raw pine, well meant enough, but done by men in ignorance of the actual nature of Texas steers. It served well enough for the carts, but the herd would have none of it and insisted on swimming, as they had crossed so many other streams. It was after they had crossed that, yielding to the supplications of McCoyne, a halt was called until the latter could go into town and complete certain arrangements of his own. He asked Nabours to bring on the herd later.
For some anxious moments the apostle of Abilene stood in the street looking southward. At last he waved his hat.
“Here they come!” he cried.
Tears ran down his face, perhaps alcoholic tears, but not unworthy, and pulled up in his straggly beard. He had verified his prediction. Here came the cows!
A cloud of dust approached, blown by the prairie wind. By and by the men could see the heads of the herd advancing steadily, a mingling sea of longhorns in a procession interminably long. The word passed now and even the saloons were emptied. All Abilene came to see and welcome the first herd up the trail. It seemed a large event to them. Not a man of them, not the wildest dreamer of them all, ever guessed that it was the opening of one of the greatest epochs in American history. Men even would have scoffed at the assertion that thirty-five thousand cattle would reach Abilene that year, seventy-five thousand the year following; that soon the state of Texas would be trailing north over a million head a year.