Carver knew that this rule was true. Trailherds, traveling as they did through cattle-populated ranges, experienced a certain accretion of numbers through the joining of curious or lonesome cows and it was no infrequent thing for a drove to reach the shipping point a number of head stronger than on the start. The foremen of trail crews were supposed to use every effort to avoid such accretions and to work their herds at intervals and throw out any off-brands. Many, in order to save time and trouble, waited until reaching the quarantine belt before cutting their herds. The brand owners grazing in the unowned lands had formed the Cherokee Strip Cattlemen’s Association, and this organization maintained brand inspectors at the Caldwell stockyards to guard against the possibility of any of its members’ cows being inadvertently shipped with droves that had been trail-herded through their ranges. “No, the trail herds don’t usually drop many of their own steers en route,” Carver agreed. “It’s more apt to be reversed. But the rule holds good in Texas as well as in the Strip, so I’ll go out and sign up a dozen or so of them, even if the paper proves to be only a futile sort of a document in the end.” Some three weeks thereafter Carver rode with Bart Lassiter up a scrub-oak side hill. A little camp nestled in the draw below them where two other men rode herd on a dozen head of steers. “It appears to me like you’d staked a losing venture,” Bart asserted, “with three riders and a cook on your payroll and only a dozen steers in camp. We’ve covered this whole neighborhood thorough and yet you stay round. Why don’t we move to some more likely piece of country, say toward the head of the Cimarron?” “But it’s so much simpler to let all those strays have time to come down here and join us than by our rushing things and trying to ride that whole big country in search of them ourselves,” said Carver. They topped the ridge and Carver pulled up his horse behind a scrub-oak thicket. A trail herd streamed down the far slope of the valley and was halted in a meadow that opened out in the timbered bottoms of Turkey Creek two miles above Crowfoot’s ranch, the one place in the Strip not yet deserted. Crowfoot, having beef contracts to fill, had been permitted to retain a number of steers on the Turkey Creek range with the understanding that the last of the animals was to be slaughtered and the place vacated thirty days prior to the date scheduled for the entry of the Unowned Lands. “Just consider the amount of territory that herd has covered,” Carver commented.