“Well, Jesse only followed the road that crossed the Canadian at Roberts’ Ferry—the old Whisky Trail. He headed west instead of north, after a while. He went up the Brazos and west across to the Concho with a bunch of cows. He knew there was a military market at Fort Sumner, on the Pecos, over in New Mexico. So he made the big two-day dry drive west of the Concho. He hit the Pecos at the Horsehead Crossing and worked up to Sumner. Loving and Goodnight had a trail north of Sumner—clean up into Colorado. Army posts and reservations all have got to have beef, and a lot of it. Yes, that’s going to make a market some day. If we herd the Indians they’ve all got to eat.”
“_Seguro!_ Shore they have! They feed the damned Comanches, and the Comanches shoot up and murder every outfit that tracks west to the Pecos—every drive out there means a half dozen Indian fights. No money in that.
“No, nor no money in anything that has anything to do with cows,” Nabours continued. “Look at the record. Rockport, Indianola, Galveston, Mobile, New Orleans, Little Rock, Illinois, Ioway—all them foreign countries, full of damn Yankees and thieves. What ghostly chance has a Texas stockman got? I’d as soon eat javelin’ as beef—it ain’t so common, and it costs more. There’s cows thicker’n lizards all the way from Matagorda to Doan’s Store on the Red, and west far’s the Staked Plains. We’re busted, friend. The South is licked. We’ve got a carpetbag government and no hope of any change. If all Texas was worth one solitary whoop in hell do you reckon you could buy a mile square of vine-mesquite grass land for fourteen dollars? Not that I would, or could—I haven’t got the fourteen dollars. No, nor it don’t look like any stockman in this whole state ever will have fourteen dollars, the whole caboodle, from Santone to the Sabine. This is the poorest place in the whole damned world, Texas is, and I’m here for to prove it.”
Jim Nabours’ long-pent dissatisfaction had led him into the longest speech of his entire life. He knew he had an understanding hearer in this grave young man from Gonzales, who nodded, noncommittal as heretofore. Nabours went on.
“And yet,” said he vehemently, “why, now, Miss Taisie, that owns this ranch brand, now, she wants to try it again, north! Would you believe that? Wasn’t her father murdered by them damned people that beat up pore Jimmy Dougherty on the Missoury border two years ago? Huh! He was crazy to drive north. What did it bring him? His death, and the ruin of Del Sol!
