“Another point you’re overlooking is the nature of a steer,” Younger protested. “Once he gets lonesome he’ll bawl and travel and attach himself to the first trail herd that drifts through. Did you ever consider that little kink in the make-up of a steer?”
“It was through studying over that very point that I acquired the notion,” Carver said.
“Oh,” said Younger. “Yes, I see. All right, son, I’ll sign them up.”
“There’s the trail bosses of forty different Texas brands in town,” Carver continued. “And there’s a dozen or so I’d like to sign up on the same basis. I’ll go out and interview them while you fix up the others.”
“But you won’t find any Texas strays in this end of the Strip,” Younger predicted. “A trail boss isn’t so much averse to letting an off-brand join his herd, but he’s dead set against letting one of his own steers desert it.”
Carver knew that this rule was true. Trailherds, traveling as they did through cattle-populated ranges, experienced a certain accretion of numbers through the joining of curious or lonesome cows and it was no infrequent thing for a drove to reach the shipping point a number of head stronger than on the start. The foremen of trail crews were supposed to use every effort to avoid such accretions and to work their herds at intervals and throw out any off-brands. Many, in order to save time and trouble, waited until reaching the quarantine belt before cutting their herds. The brand owners grazing in the unowned lands had formed the Cherokee Strip Cattlemen’s Association, and this organization maintained brand inspectors at the Caldwell stockyards to guard against the possibility of any of its members’ cows being inadvertently shipped with droves that had been trail-herded through their ranges.
“No, the trail herds don’t usually drop many of their own steers en route,” Carver agreed. “It’s more apt to be reversed. But the rule holds good in Texas as well as in the Strip, so I’ll go out and sign up a dozen or so of them, even if the paper proves to be only a futile sort of a document in the end.”
Some three weeks thereafter Carver rode with Bart Lassiter up a scrub-oak side hill. A little camp nestled in the draw below them where two other men rode herd on a dozen head of steers.
“It appears to me like you’d staked a losing venture,” Bart asserted, “with three riders and a cook on your payroll and only a dozen steers in camp. We’ve covered this whole neighborhood thorough and yet you stay round. Why don’t we move to some more likely piece of country, say toward the head of the Cimarron?”
“But it’s so much simpler to let all those strays have time to come down here and join us than by our rushing things and trying to ride that whole big country in search of them ourselves,” said Carver.