With a sharp stroke of his whip, Scot started the team into a smart trot down into the canon. Then he turned to the doctor and quietly answered: "Doc, you seem to forget that Joe Loving is dying, and that I _promised_ to fetch you. Reckon you'll have to go!" And down they went into what seemed the very jaws of death. But Scot was right. It was a triumph of logic. The Navajos were indeed lying for bigger game. And so it happened that, come safely through the canon, out two miles on the plain they met a train off eight freight teams travelling toward Vegas. They stopped and gave the freighters warning, told what they had seen, begged them to halt and corral their wagons. But it was no use. The freighters thought themselves strong enough to repel any attack, and drove on into the canon. None of them came out. And to this day the traveller through Enteros may see pathetic evidence of their foolhardiness in a scattered lot of weather-worn and rusted wheel tires and hub bands. Before midnight Scot and the doctor reached Sumner, having changed teams twice at Mexican _placitas_. Covering two hundred and sixty miles in less than thirty hours, Scot Moore had kept his word! Unhappily, however, Joe Loving had become so weak that he died under the shock of the operation. Now Scot Moore himself is dead and gone, but the memory of his heroic ride should live as long as noble deeds are sung. CHAPTER II A COW-HUNTERS' COURT The recent death of Shanghai Rhett, at Llano, Texas, makes another hole in the rapidly thinning ranks of the pioneer Texas cow-hunters. Cow-hunting in early days was the industry upon which many of the greatest fortunes of the State were founded, and from it sprang the great cattle-ranch industry that between the years 1866 and 1885 converted into gold the rich wild grasses of the tenantless plains and mountains of Texas, New Mexico, the Indian Territory, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana. The economic value of this great industrial movement in promoting the settlement and development of that vast region of the West lying between the ninety-eighth and one hundred and twentieth meridians, and embracing half the total area of the United States, is comprehended by few who were not personally familiar with the conditions of its rise and progress. There can be no question that the ranch industry hastened the occupation and settlement of the Plains by at least thirty years. Farming in those wilds was then an impossibility. Remote from railways, unmapped, and untrod by white men, it was under the sway of hostile Indians, before whose attacks isolated farming settlements, with houses widely scattered, would have been defenceless,--alike in their position and in their inexperience in Indian warfare. Then, moreover, there was neither a market nor means of transportation or the farmer's product. All these conditions the Texas cow-hunters changed, and they did it in little more than a decade.