For some anxious moments the apostle of Abilene stood in the street looking southward. At last he waved his hat.
Tears ran down his face, perhaps alcoholic tears, but not unworthy, and pulled up in his straggly beard. He had verified his prediction. Here came the cows!
A cloud of dust approached, blown by the prairie wind. By and by the men could see the heads of the herd advancing steadily, a mingling sea of longhorns in a procession interminably long. The word passed now and even the saloons were emptied. All Abilene came to see and welcome the first herd up the trail. It seemed a large event to them. Not a man of them, not the wildest dreamer of them all, ever guessed that it was the opening of one of the greatest epochs in American history. Men even would have scoffed at the assertion that thirty-five thousand cattle would reach Abilene that year, seventy-five thousand the year following; that soon the state of Texas would be trailing north over a million head a year.
Ahead and alongside, mounted on wiry little horses, rode men ragged, coatless, long of hair, bearded; tall men, sinewy, insouciant. The saddles of these men had double girths, wide low horns and deep leather flaps hanging low over the feet of the riders. Each man had a thin hide reata coiled at his saddle horn. Each man wore a heavy belt at which hung a heavy revolver, and a few carried rifles under their legs. They came easily, steadily, ahead, their own eyes full of wonder but not of fear.
Well to the front and paralleling the column to windward came the great wheeled carts with white tops, each drawn by two yoke of oxen. On the front seat of one sat a black woman, with a long musket across her lap. Upon yet another was an old woman, dark, wrinkled of face, attending strictly to her own business.
The tilt flaps of the lead cart were closed. The cattle which drew it followed the horseman who rode just ahead—an old man, of face also dark and wrinkled, who wore a very tall conical sombrero, the first of the like ever seen in Abilene, the only one of all his company. His cotton clothing was meager, he himself was meager, his horse was meager. Upon his saddle horn there was perched what proved to be a bird whose plumage bore a luster of its own; a bird somewhat battered and bedraggled, with certain feathers of wing and tail missing and a crest somewhat torn and dragging; which none the less raised its head from time to time and emitted a loud and defiant crow. At times Sanchez ran a thin brown hand over Gallina, his sole surviving fighting cock.