THE sun-drenched landscape of the Southwest lay warm, indolent, full of somber fire. The home buildings rested in the arm of a great live-oak grove, opposite whose opening appeared a wide land of rolling contours, now almost in the thin green of coming spring. Six miles away the tree lines showed a stream, and beyond that, as most folk knew, lay the great lake which originally had led Burleson Lockhart to take up this range. This side and that ran miles of mesquite, stretching south, tall cactuses showing betimes among the twisted thorny trees.
It was a little-known corner of America, in what one day was to be known as the great breeding range, last of the holdings above the Rio Grande to fall from the lax hand of Spain. The lack of rain left the vegetation anguished. A thousand distorted souls in torment lived in these gray trees. Soon the direct sun rays would again be searing into brown the new and tender grass, though it scarce had had its one annual chance to gasp in green.
A lizard scuttled across the dust of the dooryard. A road-runner sped along the fence of poles and rawhide, bent on its own mission. War was marked in every sign and token of Texas from its very first. No manner of pest and curse ever lacked in its cynically indifferent confines. Starvation, thirst, filled these mud-thickened bayous every year with hundreds of dead horses. The bones of cattle lay uncounted for a thousand miles, each dried hide and rack of whitening bones enriching soil that had no answer to its own fecundity in animal life. To live, to breed and to die—that was all that animal life there could do. Nothing to the dead creature that it had never known the shambles. The rack of bones was good enough for Spain.
But now had come Saxon men. Texas, savage, abounding, multiplying undisturbed, was now for the first time seeking outlet for her superabundant life, which for fifty years had increased undisturbed. Texas owned millions of worthless cattle; how many, no owner knew, nor could any man tell how far his cows ranged. He did not care. Unbranded cattle still ran in thousands. No one hunted strays, and the increase of strays belonged without reservation to the land that fed them. There was no cattle association, no general rodeo; and the home gatherings never claimed to be complete. Title, whether in land or cattle, was much a matter of indifference.
Of law there was little. A vast and unknown empire was controlled by a rude baronry whose like the world has never seen; who later were vastly to extend that empire and its ways.
These men set up the one great law of custom. The custom of the range was based on the natural habits of the cattle and the natural peculiarities of the grazing lands. The accepted brand, the right of the finder to an unowned range or water front, the tendency of cattle to cling to home, the law of natural probability in all things—such were rigid natural laws which no man might ignore with safety. As animal life ran wild, so also did human life, one no more restrained than the other. Only the saving grace of the Saxon instinct for some sort of law brought Texas, literally born in the wilderness, up to what she is to-day.
There was no market. At least, rambling and unconcerted attempts had found none till now. After the Civil War a seething unrest passed over all Texas. The demand for some sort of market was first in the thought of all men who owned nothing but cows and reasoned only in terms of cows.
“She’s going to drive!” said Jim Nabours to his new-found friend as they crossed the Del Sol dooryard. “That’s her pap’s old idee. What you’ve said cinches it!”
“Yes? When can you begin the herd?”