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first big government contract called for the delivery of ten thousand beeves at Fort Sumner, where nearly ten thousand Indians were held as government wards. While this number of cattle were fattening on the Bosque Grande ranges, more than half of them were stolen, and he had to bring in another herd from Texas to fulfil his contract. He obtained another order for eleven hundred steers from Fort Stanton. He bought these cattle at eighteen dollars a head in gold at Trickham, Texas, and was to receive thirty-five dollars a head for them at the army post. Here was prospect of fat profits. But on the drive through the Guadalupe Mountains, Apaches attacked him and stampeded off with the entire herd. Chisum arrived at Fort Stanton with six steers. He had better luck when Mexican freebooters rounded up twelve hundred of his horses and headed back for the Rio Grande with their booty. Chisum and four of his men followed their trail, and overtaking them at the Horsehead Crossing of the Pecos, killed three of the robbers and recovered the herd. So wagged the world on that spacious and lawless frontier.

But Chisum at last had found his markets. He rose to his new opportunities in a big way. His business developed to gigantic proportions as the years went by. He made his market radius as wide as the map of the Southwest and took in Colorado and Kansas for good measure. Within two years, at the height of his prosperity, he drove five thousand cattle to Tucson, six thousand to the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona, four thousand to the Gila River, and six thousand to Dodge City. Never a season passed that he did not have three or four herds on the move to different markets at the same time. Despite his wholesale operations, and despite wholesale thefts, his cattle increased in numbers annually. Fifteen