Roll along, little dogies, roll along! You broke one of the greatest paths in all the world! You carried the South into the North! It was you who ended the war!
The lazy song of half-somnolent riders, ragged, lean, brown, rose on the afternoon air of one more sunny day after sunny day. By this time the herd had but one more considerable stream, the Salt Fork of the Arkansas, between it and the main stream of the Arkansas. The men now all were studying geography as best they might, for gradually they all had concluded that Texas was far behind them, and that they were in a world they knew not.
“She’s shore a perty country, Miss Taisie,” said Jim Nabours when they paused for their noonday rest, the first stop north of the Cimarron. “It looks to me like folks could almost live here, some day, though I don’t see no cows nowheres.”
He could not dream that within a few short years there would be cattle under fence in all that country; that long before that time abundant strays would run wild as wild horses; that even then stretched illimitedly the great upper range, wholly undiscovered, soon to be clamoring for cows, to carry on a business which was then an unsuspected thing.
“Come along here, Miss Taisie,” he continued, inviting her to take a seat beside him on the grass and spreading down a crumpled sheet of brown paper. It held what cannot be bought to-day for any money—a more or less precise map of the first old cow trail from Texas north, although only his rude amateur hand had drawn it. The clumsy finger of the trail boss pointed out to his employer their locality as near as he himself could guess it.
“Dan McMasters and me talked this over afore he quit us,” he explained. “I’ve drawed it the best I could, and it’s sort of helpful too. Near as I can figure it, we’re just about to cross thirty-six north. My pap told me that thirty-six-thirty was where slavery ended and the damn Yankees begun.”
“Yes; the Missouri Compromise,” nodded Taisie.
“Anyways my pap told me that thirty-six, along in there, was about where cotton wouldn’t grow so well nohow, and where the ticks probably would fall offen the cows in the wintertime. The line must come right about here.”
“What line?” demanded Len Hersey, who was listening in and who now bent over the rude map curiously. “I kep’ a clost look all the time we’ve been on the trail, an’ so fur from seein’ any thirty-six lines atween here and where we all started, I ain’t seen nary line a-tall.”