So Taisie Lockhart, the first woman ever to cross the doorstep of the Drovers’ Cottage, with the exception of Lou Gore herself, came right on in. And as she passed the door and started toward the hall which opened from the front-office room she saw standing before her the man she had hoped and feared she would never see again—Dan McMasters. CHAPTER XXXIX THE WOMAN ON the flat prairie, whose solid turf offered good footing to the ponies, the Del Sol riders, cursing their luck, finished rounding up their stampeded cattle. “I’m willing to admit there is such a place as Aberlene now,” grumbled Nabours, “but it ain’t inhabitated by no human beings. This here idea of meeting a herd of cows with a brass band ain’t no ways according to no kind of Hoyle.” “I ain’t taking no more chances about going through town,” he added. “We’ll throw them around the town and stop about three mile north. Ef anybody wants to see them cows they’ve got to come out there to our camp, and not bring no brass band neither.” Wherefore, with exception of the few head already penned in the Abilene Stockyards, the Del Sol herd circumvented Abilene and all its attractions, and finally turned out on good grazing ground north of town. When at length the cattle were quiet and grazing the men pulled up with a feeling of vast relief, which each expressed in his own way. “Well, boys,” said the trail boss to those nearest him, “here’s where we lean our saddles on the ground for a while. Tell Buck to pitch about here. The other cart’ll likely stay in town.” It was the last camp at the end of the road, farthest north for any Texan longhorn at that hour. The long days and nights of trail work now were over. Anita helped the cook to unload the cart which nominally was his, although he rarely had driven it. Strange and complex seemed the cargo as it was heaped up on the prairie. The three saddles of the lost men, their bridles and others; bed rolls and saddle blankets, kettles, pots and pans; ox yokes and trace chains; spurs, hair ropes and hide reatas; collapsed sacks of meal and flour and beans; some slabs of side meat, a mess box and a coffee mill, sections of several dried rawhides—all mingling with the meager war bags of a score of men. There were even a pair of horns of giant size, detached from the head of an aged steer whose neck had not proven able to withstand the pull of two reatas when it was attempted to haul him out of a quicksand crossing where he had bogged down. Len Hersey had chopped them off and put them in the cart, declaring that he wanted them for a “soo-vee-ner.” “We got all the comforts o’ home now,” remarked that insouciant soul as he rode by. “Maybe I kin trade them horns fer a shirt.”