“I knew you’d come!” said he. “I know you are drovers! Where is your herd? I told them I’d find a herd coming up to Abilene this spring. McCoyne’s my name.”
“Well,” said the trail boss, “they call me Jim Nabours. We’re people from Caldwell County, Texas—thousand miles south of here for all I know, or anyway six hundred. We’re in the T.L.; Fishhook road brand. We was headed for Aberlene.”
“That’s my town,” said the stranger. “And I’ll tell you, friend, she is a town! We’ve got the railroad, and I’ve got the stockyards, built and waiting. Don’t let no one talk to you about Baxter Springs; don’t you think of stopping at Caldwell or Wichita. Abilene is the only town in Kansas with a railroad and a stockyards and a real market. There’s buyers five deep a-waiting for you up there. How many cattle you got?”
“Great Scott! Abilene’s made! You’re made too!”
“How much did you pay for cows when you started north?” he asked. Nabours was looking at his eyes.
“You ain’t so sick!” said he. “Well, we didn’t pay nothing for ours. We raised them by hand from calves. How much can a man get for fine fours in your neighborhood?”
“Well, that depends; but all they’re worth. Do you want to contract yours as they come, straight fours at ten a head?”
“Ten a head!” said Jim Nabours with well-feigned surprise. “What? Fours like them? Fat and ready for market? Well there may be a little she-stuff in here and there, but we couldn’t help that. Us Texans always figgers one cow’s as old and as fat as another.”
“As good as any,” asserted the stranger. “There’s millions of acres of range north and west of Abilene, a-weeping and a-wailing for stock cattle. There’s millions of pounds of beef that’s got to be raised on Army contracts to feed the reservation Indians. There’s all America and all Europe east of here. Market? Why, man, we can take five million cattle, in five years, if you can bring them in! You’re the first, and you didn’t know it! You didn’t even know where Abilene was!”
“We don’t yet,” replied Nabours; “but we’re willing to rock along with you and have you show us.”
“I’ll be glad to! What d’you say to three cents a pound on the hoof?”
Nabours looked at him with astonishment in his eyes.
“Mister, you talk like them cows was sugar or coffee. I never did hear of ary man selling a cow that way. No man can tell how much a cow weighs by looking at him, and I never did see one weighed. Of course, I could make a scales by swinging a pole and putting a few men at the other end of it to balance up a cow—you can guess how much a man weighs pretty clost. But all that’d take too much time. No, a cow is a cow where I come from, whether he’s big or little.”