As it happened, my feet were set in other paths by force of circumstances. Only for that the sage-brush country, the very place where I was born might have remained a terra incognita. I should always have felt, though, that I’d missed something, for I was ushered into this vale of tears at the Summer ranch on the Red River of the South. Sumner _here_ hadn’t developed into a cow monarch those days, but he was on the way. My earliest impressions were all of log and ’dobe buildings, _of long-horned cattle_, of wild, shaggy-maned horses, and of wilder men who rode the one and drove the other in masterly fashion. For landscape there was rolling prairie, and more rolling prairie beyond; and here and there the eternal brown of it was broken by gray sage-grown flats and stretches of greasewood—as if Nature had made a feeble effort to break the monotony. I knew only this until I was big enough to tease for a pony. I cannot remember seeing a town when I was small. The world to me was a place of great plains, very still, and hot, and dry, a huddle of cabins, and corrals, and a little way to the south Red River slinking over its quicksands—except in time of storm; then it raged. So that when my father bundled mother and myself off to a place called St. Louis, where great squadrons of houses stood in geometrical arrangement over a vast area, I had already begun to look upon things with the eyes of cattleland. I recollect that when we were settled in a roomy, old-fashioned house I cried because my mother would not let me go out to the corral and play. “There are no corrals in a city, dear,” she explained—and I cried the harder. I could conceive of no joy in a place where I could not go out to the corrals and have some brown-faced cowpuncher hoist me up on a gentle horse and let me hold the reins while the pony moved sedately about. Left to himself, I think my father would have made a cowman of me, but mother had known the range when it was a place to try the nerves of strong men, and she hated it. I didn’t know till I was nearly grown that she had made dad promise when I was born that if the cattle made money for us, I should never know the plains. She came of an old Southern family, and her life had been a sheltered one till she met and married Jack Sumner. And she would have had me walk in pleasant places, as the men of her family had done—doctors, lawyers, planters, and such. The life was too hard, too much of an elemental struggle, she said—and I was to be saved some of the knocks that my dad had taken in the struggling years. Poor mother mine—her son was the son of his father, I’m afraid. But Sumner _pere_ made good on his promise when the Sumner herds fattened his bank account sufficiently; and I gyrated through school, with college and a yet-to-be-determined career looming on the horizon.