A year later a cluster of frame buildings on the north bank greeted the lead of each herd, as it emerged from the stream. Here outfits could replenish their grub supply, get or send mail by a stage route, before they vanished into the empty land that spread north to the Canada line, a land that was empty even unto the arctic circle. And into Clark’s Ford one July evening Rock Holloway rode alone, on the same sorrel horse, one of his own private mounts, that had stepped light-footedly in the dust of a Fort Worth street that spring. For weeks he had faced the dip and roll and flatness of plains as bare as the seas Columbus faced when he crossed the Western ocean. Ride, eat, sleep, and ride again, in the dust of eight thousand hoofs, on that pilgrimage from the Rio Grande to the forty-ninth parallel, across silent leagues of grass, from which the bison had but lately vanished, and where the Indian had not yet forgotten how to take a white man’s scalp. * * * * * So Rock, who had nothing much on his mind but a Stetson hat, rode into Clark’s Ford. Little sinks of iniquity like this were not new in his experience. He was too sensible to take a moral attitude. They were not, with their gaudy activities, much to his taste, but they supplied a want. He didn’t drink much at any time, preferring poker for pastime, and he had been known to wander about for hours in the midst of cow-town hilarity doing nothing but watch his fellows make merry. Clark’s Ford numbered scarcely a dozen buildings. One general store, one blacksmith shop, one combined saloon and dance hall. A gaunt boarding house purveyed food and sleeping quarters to clerks, gamblers, bartenders, and transients. Clark’s Ford was little more than a camp, a mushroom growth with neither a past nor a future. It was not a place that Ben Clark would have been proud to bear his name. If it catered in some measure to the legitimate necessities of these Argonauts of the plains, it likewise battened on their weaknesses. Cattlemen and their riders had few illusions about such places, except in moments of alcoholic exaltation. They were tolerant of them, that was all, because they were centers of human contact, in the midst of an unpeopled wilderness.