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obscurity of prairie villages. But in the brief years of their romance, they were the most colourful, the most picturesque, the most lawless, the toughest towns of the old frontier; saloons, gambling houses, dance halls booming; six-shooters blazing in the streets; cowboys shooting out the lights; a man every morning for breakfast; whisky, faro, women, revel and riot night and day; and out somewhere on the stark prairie the inevitable Boot Hill cemetery crowded with the graves of those who had paid the fiddler and gone into the great dark with their boots on.

John Chisum failed to sense the imminent great change that was to turn the Texas cattle ranges into gold mines. Few men did. The new prosperity stormed up out of a blue sky almost without sign or portent to herald its approach. But, after all, there was sound wisdom in his westward trek. The coming of the railroads that had boomed the price of cattle in Texas boomed it likewise in New Mexico. A steer at Las Vegas was worth as much as a steer at Abilene. Fifteen hundred miles lay between the Concho ranges and the Kansas markets, and it took two months to make the drive. Markets in New Mexico were near at hand and the railroad shipping points in Kansas were no farther from the Pecos than from the Concho.

When John Chisum settled in New Mexico, the Pecos Valley was wild country. The Mescalero Apaches, in their mountain fastnesses to the west, looked upon his invading herds as fair prey for constant plundering raids. Mexican marauders came frequently on whirlwind forays across the Rio Grande and stampeded back with his cattle and horses. White rustlers were busy and, in the long run, his herds suffered more serious losses from their depredations than from those of Mexicans and Indians. His