be felt throughout the State, and the
heavy holders of scrip were offering to locate large tracts to
suit the convenience of purchasers. Several railroads held immense
quantities of scrip voted to them as bonuses, all the charitable
institutions of the State were endowed with liberal grants, and the
great bulk of certificates issued during the Reconstruction regime
for minor purposes had fallen into the hands of shrewd speculators.
Among the latter was a Chicago firm, who had opened an office at Fort
Worth and employed a corps of their own surveyors to locate lands
for customers. They held millions of acres of scrip, and I opened
negotiations with them to survey a number of additions to my Double
Mountain range. Valuable water-fronts were becoming rather scarce,
and the legislature had recently enacted a law setting apart every
alternate section of land for the public schools, out of which grew
the State's splendid system of education. After the exchange of a few
letters, I went to Fort Worth and closed a contract with the Chicago
firm to survey for my account three hundred thousand acres adjoining
my ranch on the Salt and Double Mountain forks of the Brazos. In my
own previous locations, the water-front and valley lands were all that
I had coveted, the tracts not even adjoining, the one on the Salt Fork
lying like a boot, while the lower one zigzagged like a stairway in
following the watercourse. The prices agreed on were twenty cents an
acre for arid land, forty for medium, and sixty for choice tracts,
every other section to be set aside for school purposes in compliance
with the law. My foreman would designate the land wanted, and the firm
agreed to put an outfit of surveyors into the field at once.

My two ranches were proving a valuable source of profit. After
starting five herds of seventeen thousand cattle on the trail
that spring, and shipping on consignment fifteen hundred bulls to
distilleries that fall, we branded nineteen thousand five hundred
calves on the two ranges. In spite of the heavy drain, the brand
was actually growing in numbers, and as long as it remained an open
country I had ample room for my cattle even on the Clear Fork. Each
stock was in splendid shape, as the culling of the aging and barren of
both sexes to Indian agencies and distilleries had preserved the brand
vigorous and productive. The first few years of its establishment I
am satisfied that the Double Mountain ranch increased at the r