“Is the new chute ready?” he asked, settling back into the saddle as he uncoiled a leg from around the horn. “We’ve got to get ’em in the road brand.”
“The boys got the wings done this morning,” replied Williams. “It won’t take forever to put our Fishhook road brand over the T. L. But I’ll bet a horse there’s mossy horns in there’ll brand as hard as a tarrypin, and calves that’ll take two to hold the brand.”
In a lesser flat, a couple of miles from the home corrals, new corrals and a branding chute had hurriedly been put up by the T. L. hands for the quicker process of working the trail herd. The material was mesquite posts set deep, with cross poles lashed on with hide. A nail was a thing unknown. The two men rode along the fenced lines approvingly.
“The sher’f’s a cow hand, all right,” said Nabours. “Just how he finds time to quit the sher’f’s office is what he ain’t explained, no more’n a lot of other things. But cows he does know. He’s coming in now.”
The rider who approached them from the farther side of the flat was not easily recognizable as the same young man who had ridden alone into the Del Sol gate a fortnight or more ago. His garb now was the loose wool of the average cattle hand of the place and day, his checkerboard trousers thrust into his bootlegs. Chaparajos he did not now wear, nor did any Saxon Texans when they could avoid it. There was at that time no standardized cowboy, nor any uniform for him. Indeed, the very name of “cowboy” was unknown on the lower range. The Del Sol ranch hands were for the most part sons of neighboring ranches, most of them lank, whiskered, taciturn young men, and for the most part seedy of apparel. They came in what garb they were able to get, and they utterly lacked uniformity, beyond the fact that each could ride, rope and brand, and all were able to live on food that would have killed men less hardy.
One of such company might have been Dan McMasters now as he plodded forward, mounted on a stout grulla of his own string—a blue-crane horse such as would sometimes be seen in any large remuda. He had appeared at Del Sol a week earlier than he had promised, but had forbidden the men to announce him at the house. He had lived with the cattle hands, and wished his presence to be unknown, he said, until after the herd was on its way. All for reasons which he did not declare.
He was taciturn and mysterious as ever to Jim Nabours, and the latter also grew chary of speech. Low as his own resources were, it did not wholly please him that, stacked up in two newly arrived trail wagons near the home corral, were supplies enough to run the outfit through to Abilene. It pleased him no more that if the Del Sol remuda now carried under its own road brand another brand, that brand should be the McMasters Circle Arrow, which was ranged in Gonzales County, far below. Del Sol had never borrowed, never been obliged.
“Amigos! Caballeros!” McMasters waved a hand as he drew near.
Del Williams looked at him in silence, nor was Nabours at first much more communicative.
“Well,” he said at length, “that there bunch of cows is what we call our trail herd. I expect they’d all hold still and let us brand ’em standing. The boss don’t suspect nothing but what this here herd is all select fours. Well, let her think so. Grass is up strong here, and we’ll not ketch it as we move north. So let’s push this here Noah’s-ark outfit into the pens and get it in the Fishhook soon’s the Lord’ll let us!”