Now, pawns on the great chessboard of the gods where not even pawns ever had been placed before, the ragged crew of Del Sol was pushing up, two degrees eastward of the north-and-south dividing line. They had been traveling somewhere near the ninety-eighth meridian, of which not one of them ever had heard. Not many of them ever had heard of thirty-six-thirty, or of the Missouri Compromise. They fought a war without much history, for the rank and file, as always is the case, had but narrow horizons. They were simply cowmen; and now they were driving north. To them Abilene, their objective, was as vague a thing as had been the cities of Cibola to Coronado’s men when they also once crossed the great chessboard of the immortal gods, caring not even for the grasses, so good for buffalo and cows, and also missing all the minerals that lay beneath their feet, although it was one mineral they sought. That was in the past. The immortal gods had decided that now it was time for men to move north. There was to be a great new constructive day. But it seems that there is implanted in Nature and in the universe the law of two opposing forces; centrifugal and centripetal; good and evil; constructive and destructive; that which feeds and is preyed upon by that which fattens; that which produces and creates, countered by that which destroys and tears down; that which sows to reap, and that which reaps where it has not sown. Therefore it was quite as much foreordained that Rudabaugh and his men should pass north to prey on the Del Sol herd as that the Del Sol herdsmen should be driving north into a new day. * * * * * Be all these things assigned such causes as they may in each man’s philosophy, at the end of his nose or farther, a new epoch was at hand for the vast unsettled West. Rudabaugh and his men had discussed that daily and nightly as they pushed on up the Washita River of the Indian Nations. They finally camped at the ford of the Washita, well in advance of the Del Sol men and directly north of them, although neither knew the proximity of the other. The ruffian leader had no more than twenty men in his band. He had recruited these from classes naturally unscrupulous and restless under any law. But all criminal tendency is in its way a sort of individual initiative, self-assertiveness, after all; so that Rudabaugh found his men not always wholly submissive to any man’s will. They were less so now than ever. Repeatedly Rudabaugh had to explain to them again and over again that they were after large game, that the division would be large per capita. They were more like Coronado’s men—wanted mineral in hand; minted mineral. “Well, I don’t mind saying,” remarked one of the bolder of his men at the second night of encampment at the Washita crossing—a city lies near there to-day—“I’ll be free to say that I don’t noways like the look of things.” Rudabaugh turned to him savagely.