Nabours grinned. “You’d orto have rid on in.” “The trail has changed since I was here. Of course, I used to know Del Sol. My father, Calvin McMasters—you’ve heard of him?—was a friend of Colonel Burleson Lockhart forty years back. They died together, and in the same way—you know how. But I was away three years with my regiment, and lately I’ve never got around to ride up the hundred miles from the south.” “You’re riding back from north now?” “Yes.” “Far?” “From Arkansas.” “So?” “Yes. I came down the Washita and crossed the Red at the Station, in from the Nations.” “How’s that country up in there for cows?” asked Jim Nabours, with the cowman’s invariable interest in new lands. “I never been acrost the Red. Palo Pinto’s about the limit I make for hunting our cows on the north.” “Good range all the way through the Nations; good all the way from here across the Red and clean up to what they call the Kansas line—that’s above the Cherokee Outlet. I was in east, along the Arkansas line.” “Water?” “Plenty.” Nabours remained silent for a time. “Tell me, friend,” said he at length. “How about Colonel Lockhart’s old notion? He worked some cows north, like, on the Jess Chisholm Trail, up along the Washita, north of the Red somewheres. Arkansaw was where he went, and the last time he went he didn’t never come back.” The faces of both men were grave. The murder of Burleson Lockhart and Calvin McMasters by the ruffians of the Arkansas border was an open wound for all Central Texas. “The Chisholm Trail isn’t any trail,” said the stranger. “I came down that way myself, west of Wichita, but Jesse never did herd anything much over it. He did drive two-three little bunches from the Red River to Little Rock, Arkansas, not over a thousand head in all; but like as not he got the idea from my father and Colonel Lockhart. They both always said that Texas would have to find a market north. “You see, they all had the good old Texas idea about starting a beef cannery to market our surplus cows. Some folks called Fowlers started to pack at Little Rock. Their meat all spoiled and it broke the whole outfit. Jess Chisholm didn’t drive to Little Rock again. And you know my father and Burleson Lockhart paid their lives for their experiment. They wanted to do something for Texas.” “Several men has tried driving cows into Arkansaw, even Illinois, even Missoury and Ioway,” commented the foreman of Del Sol. “Bad stories comes down—herds stole by bushwhackers and desperadoes, drovers robbed, stripped, tied up and whipped, drove out of the country, sent home broke or else left dead like them two good men. It’s bad along the Arkansaw and Missoury border. Plenty others has been killed up there. Bad business. Us Texans ought to even up a lot of things.” “Yes!” A sudden strange flash came into the gray eye of the young stranger. “I ought to know!” Nabours’ own keen eye narrowed. “It’s not safe to drive that way? Don’t you think that’s all foolishness?”