THE passengers who descended from the train left the coaches nearly empty. The head of steel was to the westward and new towns were projected for thirty miles; but the greater fame of Abilene, the city of the future stockyards, capital of a coming cow trade, still acted as magnet for a majority of the traders and buyers, adventurers, hunters, all the curious-minded gentry then eagerly exploiting a West which never yet had lived. The rumors of northern drives of Texas cattle had in some way gone abroad; this first arrival was a news event of the first water.
Before these arrivals now spread the vastest, sweetest empire that ever fell to gaze of any adventurers of new fortunes. The very feel of it was in the warm but vital air that blew across the waving prairies; lay in the far horizon that swept untarnished by any settler’s smoke, far as the eye might reach. The flowers here also had not yet known a bee and there was not a weed. At times the edge of the buffalo grass was east of the Western border. The bluestem had not yet fully got to Abilene. The buffalo that year moved a little farther west. Their wallows dotted the surface of the earth thereabout for years to come. The great checkerboard of the gods, four vast spaces in the corners of the greatest crossroads of the world, still lay out as the Range—mesquite and grama in the Southwest, bunch grass and buffalo grass in the Northwest; native—and later bluestem—grasses in the Northeast; redtop and its fellows in the Southeast; all lapping, encroaching, passing, augmenting as the swift years altered the range. From Spanish-moss lands to the sagebrush steppes, from the scant grama to the waist-high green, lay the country of the cows. At that time it was but imperfectly known. The original, the aboriginal titles had not yet been extinguished.
The raw little village of itself meant not so much to most of these men, who had seen such villages before, east of the Missouri. The scanty edifices were accepted at least as sufficient. There were saloons, stores, a hotel. The travelers looked to their weapons and their luggage, and then, each after his own fashion, headed out toward the signs which made offerings to civilized man. Most went to the saloons, a few moved toward the Drovers’ Cottage, where even now, before her formal opening, Lou Gore was making mankind comfortable on the frontier. Others wandered up and down the street, gazing this way or that. None passed the corrals of the Abilene Stockyards without a curious gaze at the gaunt, long-haired creatures which now marked a renaissance of the entire cattle trade in America. It all was crude, young, new and unspeakably alluring—this strange new world, offspring of time and the whim of the immortal gods at play on their great four-squared checkerboard.
McMasters called Hickok aside, spoke to him quietly, after a time.
“Our men have gone over to the new saloon,” said he. “I see one is headed for the Twin Livery Barn. They’ve probably got horses there, or are looking for some.”
“Well,” said Hickok, “you know them best. They haven’t made any break yet and I’ve got nothing on them. None of them ever harmed me. What’s the game?”
“I want you to watch them for a little while,” replied McMasters. “I’ll not leave much to you except the watching. I’ll be with you very soon. Just now I want to find out what’s going to be done about the sale of this herd. McCoyne has got some man in tow; and yon’s Nabours, the Del Sol trail boss—he’s just come in. I think I ought to know what goes on there.”
McCoyne, the exuberant and irresistible prophet of Abilene, indeed now was bringing forward a stranger, a bearded, stocky, self-contained man of nondescript dress, yet rather of Western look himself. The three little groups now joined.
“Mr. McMasters,” begun McCoyne, “and you, too, Mr. Nabours, and Marshal Hickok, this, now, is Mr. Pattison, just come to town. He’s in the market to buy some range stuff. He’s been in the packing business in Indianapolis for several years, and he has just come out to Junction City, a couple of hours over east, to start a packing plant of his own out here; though I don’t see why he didn’t pick on Abilene for that. Anyhow he has to come here for his cattle.”
“Good morning, gentlemen,” said the stranger thus introduced, smiling humorously. “I am glad to meet you. Yes, I am looking for some cattle. I don’t know how you guessed it.”