And then Lou Gore saw, after a second and more careful look, what she had not expected to see—a tall and beautiful young girl, an astonishingly and strikingly beautiful young girl, who now for the first time parted the curtains of her conveyance and sprang lightly to the ground.
Taisie Lockhart, in men’s clothing—a thing then almost equivocal for a woman—stood looking about her as though about to fly. She seemed so much alone, so helpless, so appealing, that the only other real woman of Abilene ran to her and took her into her hospitable arms.
“Why, you poor dear!” said she. “You poor dear! You’re a girl, ain’t you! Of course, I knew! Now you come right on in!”
So Taisie Lockhart, the first woman ever to cross the doorstep of the Drovers’ Cottage, with the exception of Lou Gore herself, came right on in. And as she passed the door and started toward the hall which opened from the front-office room she saw standing before her the man she had hoped and feared she would never see again—Dan McMasters.
ON the flat prairie, whose solid turf offered good footing to the ponies, the Del Sol riders, cursing their luck, finished rounding up their stampeded cattle.
“I’m willing to admit there is such a place as Aberlene now,” grumbled Nabours, “but it ain’t inhabitated by no human beings. This here idea of meeting a herd of cows with a brass band ain’t no ways according to no kind of Hoyle.”
“I ain’t taking no more chances about going through town,” he added. “We’ll throw them around the town and stop about three mile north. Ef anybody wants to see them cows they’ve got to come out there to our camp, and not bring no brass band neither.”
Wherefore, with exception of the few head already penned in the Abilene Stockyards, the Del Sol herd circumvented Abilene and all its attractions, and finally turned out on good grazing ground north of town. When at length the cattle were quiet and grazing the men pulled up with a feeling of vast relief, which each expressed in his own way.
“Well, boys,” said the trail boss to those nearest him, “here’s where we lean our saddles on the ground for a while. Tell Buck to pitch about here. The other cart’ll likely stay in town.”
It was the last camp at the end of the road, farthest north for any Texan longhorn at that hour. The long days and nights of trail work now were over.