“Huh! Well, this trial outlet for your cattle’ll end the war quicker than all your speech makers ever will. “Of course,” he continued, “if you settle down to ranching you’ve got to get married some time. It’s a hard life for a woman here on the front, with the Indians not so far away. They tell me you have brought a young woman up here with this herd. I haven’t seen her. Lou Gore took her in charge and I’ll bet she’ll keep her close. She’s young? She can ride? Why don’t you marry her and settle down up here?” He laughed at his conceit. “You can bring up cattle from below as fast as you need more stock. Marry and settle down, son, and go into the sheriff business up here. I’ll give you my recommendation that you’re the best pistol shot I ever saw, unless it’s myself, and I’m not any too damn sure of that last. “I’d bring Agnes out here if I was in a little different line of work myself,” he added. “That’s my wife.” No man ever heard him speak in other but terms of gentleness of the woman who had married him, knowing what he was. “I have got to finish my work first before I can settle down,” said Dan McMasters, almost as sad and moody as his companion here—indeed, singularly like to him. Suddenly he touched the arm of Wild Bill, spoke in a low voice. “Look!” said he, “Don’t move! There’s our man! That’s Rudabaugh down there by the last car! So that’s the way he took to get here!” “Yes,” smiled Hickok, only amusement on his face. “He’s got here too late to stop that herd from making Abilene.” “Yes; but he got here at just the right time, for all that!” McMasters’ face was cold. The mask of expressionlessness again was covering it. His eyes, narrow, the skin of the upper eyelids drawn triangularly down, never left the man for whom so long and patiently he had been waiting. CHAPTER XLI EASTERN CAPITAL THE passengers who descended from the train left the coaches nearly empty. The head of steel was to the westward and new towns were projected for thirty miles; but the greater fame of Abilene, the city of the future stockyards, capital of a coming cow trade, still acted as magnet for a majority of the traders and buyers, adventurers, hunters, all the curious-minded gentry then eagerly exploiting a West which never yet had lived. The rumors of northern drives of Texas cattle had in some way gone abroad; this first arrival was a news event of the first water.