“I was on a herd oncet that driv to Shreveport time of the war. We got into cockleburs so heavy the cows’ tails got like clubs. They’d hung up by the tails in the piney woods over in Louisiana. You could hear ’em bawl bloody murder. I don’t know how many we left hanging in the piney woods. There wasn’t no money in that drive and the cows got thin as rails. We couldn’t even skin ’em.” “Huh!” commented the older man. “The longer you live the nearer you’ll come to learning how many things can happen to folks that trails cows, son. Give us two or three more acts of God on this drive, and we’ll be lucky ef we hit Aberlene with fifty head of cows to skin. We-all may have to sell our saddles to get home.” “Then I wouldn’t get no new shirt?” “I ain’t promising you none.” “Well,” said Len Hersey philosophically, reaching in a pocket for loose tobacco, “so long’s a man has got his spurs he don’t need a thousand shirts nohow. I don’t see nothing to worry about.” CHAPTER XXXIII THIRTY-SIX ONE delay after another, one disaster with another, the Del Sol adventurers now were far into their second month on the trail. The summer was approaching, although they had as yet made scarce more than three-fourths of their entire distance to the railroad. Day after day they advanced over a wholly unsettled country that lay for nearly its entire length between the more settled civilized tribes on the east and the buffalo range toward the west. Clinging in their wavering line fairly close to the ninety-eighth meridian, without a guide, watch, calendar or compass, they now had reached a region beautiful as a wilderness, but soon to be the seat of a later and undreamed civilization. They had been in wilderness practically all the way. At that time Austin was little more than a straggling country town. The herd cast dust into the one street of Fort Worth, then boasting not over one hundred inhabitants; and that was the last of the upper Texas towns. But what a line of cities was to follow their path on ninety-eight!