trip ends. Brother, dear,
just think of those long slings with red cherries floating around in
them that we'll be drinking, and picture us smoking cigars in a blaze.
That thought alone ought to make a hard bed both soft and warm. Then
to think we'll ride all the way home on the cars."

McCann banked his fire, and the first guard, Wheat, Stallings, and
Borrowstone, rode in from the herd, all singing an old chorus that had
been composed, with little regard for music or sense, about a hotel
where they had stopped the year before:--

"Sure it's one cent for coffee and two cents for bread,
Three for a steak and five for a bed,
Sea breeze from the gutter wafts a salt water smell,
To the festive cowboy in the Southwestern hotel."

CHAPTER X

"NO MAN'S LAND"

Flood overtook us the next morning, and as a number of us gathered
round him to hear the news, told us of a letter that Mann had got at
Doan's, stating that the first herd to pass Camp Supply had been
harassed by Indians. The "Running W" people, Mann's employers, had a
representative at Dodge, who was authority for the statement. Flood
had read the letter, which intimated that an appeal would be made to
the government to send troops from either Camp Supply or Fort Sill to
give trail herds a safe escort in passing the western border of this
Indian reservation. The letter, therefore, admonished Mann, if he
thought the Indians would give any trouble, to go up the south side of
Red River as far as the Pan-handle of Texas, and then turn north to
the government trail at Fort Elliot.

"I told Mann," said our foreman, "that before I'd take one step
backward, or go off on a wild goose chase through that Pan-handle
country, I'd go back home and start over next year on the Chisholm
trail. It's the easiest thing in the world for some big auger to sit
in a hotel somewhere and direct the management of a herd. I don't look
for no soldiers to furnish an escort; it would take the government six
months to get a move on her, even in an emergency. I left Billy Mann
in a quandary; he doesn't know what to do. That big auger at Dodge is
troubling him, for if he don't act on his advice, and loses cattle as
the result--well, he'll never boss any more herds for King and
Kennedy. So, boys, if we're ever to see the Blackfoot Agency, there's
but one course for us to take, and that's straight ahead. As old
Oliver Loving, the first Texas cowman that ever drove a herd, us