wide gray plains. Small
corrals raised their ragged arms. Each man claimed his herd of kine.
Slowly, swinging up from the far Southwest, whose settlement, slower
and still more crude, had gone on scores of years ago when the
Spaniards and the horse Indians of the lower plains were finally beaten
back from the _rancherias_, there came on the great herds of the gaunt,
broad-horned cattle, footsore and slow and weary with their march of
more than a thousand miles. These vast herds deployed in turn about
the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this
unprecedented pilgrimage. They trampled down every incipient field,
and spread abroad over all the grazing lands, until every township held
its thousands, crowded by the new thousands continually coming on.
Long train loads of these cattle, wild and fierce, fresh from the
chutes into which they were driven after their march across the
untracked empire of the range, rolled eastward day after day. Herd
after herd pressed still farther north, past Ellisville, going on
wearily another thousand miles, to found the Ellisvilles of the upper
range, to take the place of the buffalo driven from the ancient feeding
grounds. Scattered into hundreds and scores and tens, the local market
of the Ellisville settlers took its share also of the cheap cattle from
the South, and sent them out over the cheap lands.

It was indeed the beginning of things. Fortune was there for any man.
The town became a loadstone for the restless population ever crowding
out upon the uttermost frontier. The men from the farther East dropped
their waistcoats and their narrow hats at Ellisville. All the world
went under wide felt and bore a jingling spur. Every man was armed.
The pitch of life was high. It was worth death to live a year in such
a land! The pettinesses fell away from mankind. The horizon of life
was wide. There was no time for small exactness. A newspaper, so
called, cost a quarter of a dollar. The postmaster gave no change when
one bought a postage stamp. A shave was worth a quarter of a dollar,
or a half, or a dollar, as that might be. The price of a single drink
was never established, since that was something never called for. For
a cowman to spend one hundred dollars at the Cottage bar, and to lose
ten thousand dollars at cards later in the same evening, was a feat not
phenomenal. There were more cattle, south in Texas. The range-men,
acquainted with danger and