Woodson knew that the men from his old outfit--Hanson, Cleve, McCann and all the rest--would be wherever the most of the shaggy beasts had congregated for the southward drift of fall. But when he made inquiry he found that their names were unknown to the present-day dwellers of the foothills. Men told him that the buffalo was no more. That the last of them had been killed off to make room for the settler’s cows. As he traveled east he experienced a series of surprises. Stockmen’s cabins showed at every water hole where, but a few years past, there had been no human habitation within two hundred miles. All this was as it should be, he reflected; a wild country tamed and made habitable for man. It was clear that the buffalo had to go to make room for the cows. But the job had certainly been sweeping and thorough. He crossed vast stretches where domestic stock had not yet arrived but the way had been paved for them years in advance of their coming, for not a single buffalo track could he find. Little towns had sprung up with amazing rapidity. Out in the long desolate stretch between Lander and Rawlins he covered forty-two miles unmarked by a water hole, an arid region where domestic stock could not live but where the buffalo might have ranged in thousands; but here too they had been wiped out to the last hoof. It came to him that he knew of enough waste areas, as yet untouched by cows, to support a half-million head of buffalo. They would have constituted a source of revenue for many years to come. Men spoke vaguely of the “lost herd” that lived in some unknown spot and would one day repopulate these waste stretches with buffalo. Woodson could see that all this development was for the best; there were now homes where no homes stood before. But a vague uneasiness assailed him, a sense of something gone amiss with a popular idol. Some way it seemed that he had been warned of this. Some forgotten prophecy welled up out of the past to clamor for expression at the threshold of his consciousness. It troubled him that he should not quite place the thing and he attempted to shake it off. He left his horses with a cowman and held on to the east. The old trails where once the prairie schooners and the oxbows had wound interminably to the far horizon were no longer traveled. Steel rails stretched away in their stead; and the creak of wheels and leather and the bawls of plodding oxen,--all these were replaced by the rattle and roar of freight cars and the screech of the locomotives’ whistles; city streets wound where there had been naught but dog towns on blistering flats. Truly development was wonderful and he rejoiced with the rest over this sweeping transformation, the swiftest and most complete reclamation in the history of the world. But again the still small voice assailed him from within and whispered that a good and worthy job had been just a trifle too well done.