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thunder and pomp and panoply of a royal frontier progress. He filed no claim on a quarter-section of government land whereon to build a cabin and plough and toil for a scant living, but homesteaded a kingdom extending beyond the four horizons in a new range world.

From Concho County, Texas, he set out on his hegira into the farther West. His trail led through the lands of mesquite and pear south of the Llano Estacado to the Horsehead Crossing of the Pecos. Then his great herd headed northward up the Pecos Valley—an interminable column of cows, its head dipping over one horizon, its tail over the other, drifting onward lazily, sinuously, like a living river, ten miles a day over the short-grass billows of a treeless wilderness.

Texas cattle of the ancient longhorn breed were these of the Chisum outfit; the only kind the Southwest knew in those early times; descendants of importations brought over from Andalusia to Mexico in the days of the Spanish conquest; lean, lithe, as alert and quick as deer, half-wild from rustling their own living untended on the open range winter and summer; with long horns, white, blue, polished and gleaming, curving like scimitars, as sharp as bayonets and often six feet from tip to tip. No such cattle are to be found now from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border. They are gone like the buffalo, bred out of existence, only a drop of their riotous blood remaining in the fat, sleek Shorthorn, black Angus, and white-faced Hereford grades that now graze their old ranges.

Directing the course, guarding the herd against stampede or Indian raid, cowboys rode at point, swing, and drag, during the long trail days, and crooned their cow lullabies around the bedding grounds during night vigils