The long bull trains were in sight from horizon to horizon every hour of the day. The grind of the gravel wore down the hoofs of the unshod oxen, and when footsore they could not go on. One sound bull for two with tender feet was Warren's rule of trade. These crippled ones were soon made sound in the puddle pen, a sod corral flooded with sufficient water to puddle the yellow clay into a six-inch layer of stiff, healing mud, then thrown out on the open range to fatten and grow strong. But transitions were swift and sweeping. Steel rails were crowding close behind the prairie schooners and the ox-bows. Bull trains grew fewer every year and eventually Cal Warren made his last trade of two for one. Bill Harris had come back to view the railroad of which he had heard so much and he remained to witness and to be a part of the wild days of Abilene, Hays and Dodge, as each attained the apex of its glory as the railroad's end and the consequent destination of the Texas trail herds. The sight of these droves of thousands implanted a desire to run cows himself and when he was wed in Dodge he broached this project to his boyhood pal. It was the sincere wish of each to gain the other as a partner in all future enterprise, but this was not to be. Warren had seen the bottom drop out of the bull trade and he would not relinquish the suspicion that any business dealing in four-footed stock was hazardous in the extreme and he insisted that the solution of all their financial problems rested upon owning land, not cows. Harris could not be induced to farm the soil while steers were selling round eight dollars a head. Warren squatted on a quarter of land. Harris bought a few head of she-stock and grazed his cows north and west across the Kansas line into the edge of the great unknown that was styled Nebraska and Northwest District. At first his range was limitless, but in a few short years he could stand on the roof of his sod hut and see the white points of light which were squatters' wagons dotting the range to the far horizon in any direction he chose to look. The first of these to invade his range had been Cal Warren, moving on before the swarm of settlers flocking into the locality of his first choice in such alarming numbers that he feared an unhealthy congestion of humanity in the near future. The debate of farming versus cows was resumed between the two, but each held doggedly to his own particular views and the longed-for partnership was again postponed.