“All right,” said Griswold. “We’ll all pull north together in the morning. My supply wagons are up and I’ll trade you flour and bacon and dried apples for fresh beef. I’m tired of buffalo. I’ll see you, anyhow, as far as the Washita crossing. “I’m going to take Yellow Hand along with me,” he added. “All these Comanches have got plenty of meat now, and they’ll stand hitched until he comes back. I have told them that if they start any funny business I’m going to shoot Yellow Hand in front of the whole village. “Send that man over to my tent,” he said to Nabours. He pointed to McMasters, whose work he had seen. “I want to talk to him, since I know who he is. If he is a Texas sheriff and a captain of Texas Rangers he and I have got to have a little conversation about Comanches.” They two sat late that night in front of Griswold’s tent, talking by the little fire. When they parted the soldier gave the young Ranger a strong clasp of the hand. What they had said no one but themselves knew. And now, when the pink dawn of the prairie again came above the dewy grasses, there might be seen once more the sea of wide horns, in the old comfortable morning picture of the trail; the trail of days now gone by forever. CHAPTER XXIX A MAID’S MISTAKE DIMINISHED but undaunted, the great herd swept north once more into the wide, sweet, unknown world. The mingled grasslands and narrow timber tracts which lay between the heads of the water courses made for cattle drovers a land of plenty where man had not yet come. In every hollow the wild deer sprang away, the head of every draw contained its flocks of great wild turkeys. On the grassy flats were uncounted coveys of the prairie grouse. The air was enlivened with the wild calls of the giant sickle-billed curfew; and from above came the mysterious, baffling liquid tremolo of the upland plover, honey sweet to hear. Glossy green parakeets showed in the timber mottes, meadow larks made gay the air with their metallic clankings, mixed with the broken strains of melody all their own. There was life, motion, all the time in the wild landscape. The vegetable world also was rich, richer than our Government had thought when in ignorance it gave this domain to the savages in a treaty which, like all our treaties, later was to be repealed. Fruits began to appear, few of them yet ripening; wild grapes, plums. They crossed one strip of sand dunes which ran through the grassy knolls, and found an astonishing growth of dwarfed grapevines, showing not more than a foot or so above the sand, but promising fruit of great size.