nd sixty
miles in less than thirty hours, Scot Moore had kept his word!
Unhappily, however, Joe Loving had become so weak that he died under
the shock of the operation.

Now Scot Moore himself is dead and gone, but the memory of his heroic
ride should live as long as noble deeds are sung.

CHAPTER II

A COW-HUNTERS' COURT

The recent death of Shanghai Rhett, at Llano, Texas, makes another hole
in the rapidly thinning ranks of the pioneer Texas cow-hunters.
Cow-hunting in early days was the industry upon which many of the
greatest fortunes of the State were founded, and from it sprang the
great cattle-ranch industry that between the years 1866 and 1885
converted into gold the rich wild grasses of the tenantless plains and
mountains of Texas, New Mexico, the Indian Territory, Kansas, Nebraska,
Colorado, Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana.

The economic value of this great industrial movement in promoting the
settlement and development of that vast region of the West lying
between the ninety-eighth and one hundred and twentieth meridians, and
embracing half the total area of the United States, is comprehended by
few who were not personally familiar with the conditions of its rise
and progress. There can be no question that the ranch industry
hastened the occupation and settlement of the Plains by at least thirty
years. Farming in those wilds was then an impossibility. Remote from
railways, unmapped, and untrod by white men, it was under the sway of
hostile Indians, before whose attacks isolated farming settlements,
with houses widely scattered, would have been defenceless,--alike in
their position and in their inexperience in Indian warfare. Then,
moreover, there was neither a market nor means of transportation or the
farmer's product. All these conditions the Texas cow-hunters changed,
and they did it in little more than a decade.

In Texas were bred the leaders and the rank and file of that great army
of cow-hunters whose destiny it was to become the pioneers of this vast
region. Pistol and knife were the treasured toys of their childhood;
they were inured to danger and to hardship; they were expert horsemen,
trained Indian-fighters, reckless of life but cool in its defence; and
thus they were an ideal class for the pacification of the Plains.

Shanghai Rhett's death removed one of the comparatively few survivors
of this most interesting and eventful past.

In Texas after the war, when Shang was young, a