“Some things of my mother’s; laces, you know, a silver comb, pictures—and some clothes. That’s almost all, except a lot of old papers. There were bundles and bundles of my father’s old land scrip. He was always buying it, as you know; no one could stop him. He said it would be worth something some day.” “Miss Taisie, he said right! He told me that land would be worth five dollars a acre in Texas some day; maybe even ten. He said a beef four’d bring twelve dollars here on the Texas range. He said he was going to buy land, all he could get, at five cents a acre, while he could. And he’d of got a heap more in his pasture if he’d lived. And his trunk of scrip——” “By my mother’s grave!”—the girl rose to her full height in her stirrups, in a sudden tempest of wrath, her right hand high above her head—“I swear I’ll make the drive for him—and her! I swear if I ever find the thief that came in my house I’ll live for my family’s revenge, and for that alone!” “Jim, they’re robbing us! I know that herd! Do you think I’m blind! Don’t I know cows? Yon’s the leavings, the trimmings, of the Del Sol range! All right! We’ll drive the leavings. My word and my life for it, I’ll be only a man now till all these things are squared! Will you stand by me?” “You ort’n to ask, Miss Taisie.” “Jim, now listen! I want every corner of the bunk house searched, every tent, every wagon, every jacal, before we start north. If we find the box we’ll know what to do.” [Illustration: _A Paramount Picture._ _North of 36._ “JIM, WE’VE GOT TO DRIVE OUR HERDS NORTH—IT’S OUR ONLY SALVATION.”] CHAPTER IX THE TRAIL AN EMPIRE in embryo lay threading out vein filaments, insentient, antenatal—Texas, not having an identity, not yet born, but soon to be a world. What a world! How rich a world! Above, for two thousand miles, nigh a thousand miles right-angled across the needle’s path, swept another unknown world, the Great West of America, marked till now only by big-game trails and pony paths and wagon tracks. The road to Oregon was by then won. The iron rails that very year bound California to the Union. But nothing bound Texas to the Union. Unknown, discredited, aloof, a measureless wilderness herself, she did not know of the wilderness above her, and until now had cared nothing for it. In this central part of the great, varied state the grasses grew tall, the undergrowth along the streams was rank. The live oaks were gigantic, standing sometimes in great groves, always hung with gray Spanish moss. Among and beyond these lay vast glades, prairies, unfenced pastures for countless game and countless cows. It was a land of sunshine and of plenty.