nto the weirdly shifting lights of the dying embers, is
wrapped in introspection. Then, rousing, you lie down, your canopy the
dark blue vault of the heavens, your mattress the soft, curling buffalo
grass. After a night of deep refreshing sleep you spring at dawn with
every faculty renewed and tense. Breakfast eaten, you catch a favorite
roping-horse, square and heavy of shoulder and quarter, short of back,
with wide nervous nostrils, flashing eyes, ears pointing to the
slightest sound, pasterns supple and strong as steel, and of a nerve
and temper always reminding you that you are his master only by
sufferance. Now begins the day's hunt. Riding softly through cedar
brake or mesquite thicket, slipping quickly from one live oak to
another, you come upon your quarry, some great tawny yellow monster
with sharp-pointed, wide-spreading horns, standing startled and rigid,
gazing at you with eyes wide with curiosity, uncertain whether to
attack or fly. Usually he at first turns and runs, and you dash after
him through timber or over plain, the great loop of your lariat
circling and hissing about your head, the noble horse between your
knees straining every muscle in pursuit, until, come to fit distance,
the loop is cast. It settles and tightens round the monster's horns,
and your horse stops and braces himself to the shock that may either
throw the quarry or cast horse and rider to the ground, helpless, at
his mercy. Once he is caught, woe to you if you cannot master and tie
him, for a struggle is on, a struggle of dexterity and intelligence
against brute strength and fierce temper, that cannot end till beast or
man is vanquished!

Thus were the great herds accumulated in Texas after the war. But
cattle were so abundant that their local value was trifling. Markets
had to be sought. The only outlets were the mining camps and Indian
agencies of the Northwest, and the railway construction camps then
pushing west from the Missouri River. So the Texans gathered their
cattle into herds of two thousand to three thousand head each, and
struck north across the trackless Plains. Indeed this movement reached
such proportions that, excepting in a few narrow mining belts, there is
scarcely one of the greater cities and towns between the ninety-eighth
and one hundred and twentieth meridians which did not have its origin
as a supply point for these nomads. Figures will emphasize the
magnitude of the movement. The cattle-drive