“It looks like you was riding, too,” commented Nabours. He nodded to the saddled horse of McMasters, the additional horse with light pack, whose lariat was thrown over the saddle horn.
“Yes,” said McMasters in his cold and noncommittal way.
“I wish you didn’t have to go. The men don’t want to see you go. It’s only kind of hard for them to say so. But afore you do ride north—and I reckon I know why you do—I wisht you’d sort of give me some idee of the country ahead. You’ve heard or seen more of it than I ever have.”
McMasters took a stick and began to make a map in the smoothed ashes of the camp fire.
“I’d like to help you over the Washita,” he said: “but you won’t find that a very bad crossing—steep banks, and swift, but narrow. You’d better make some sort of raft and get the carts across.
“The next big river is the main Canadian, not so far above here. It’ll be dry, always very little water in it. It’s bone-dry sometimes for a hundred miles.
“The North Fork of the Canadian—it runs here—is the crookedest river out of doors. It carries more water than the big river. You will probably have to swim some there, but you ought to make it all right.
“You’ll get through the blackjack country, and then you’ll come up to the Cimarron-easy fording. Just beyond that you’ll be somewhere close to latitude thirty-six. You might then almost say you are getting out of the South and into the North.
“My father and old Colonel Lockhart always used to talk to me about wintering all their cattle just under that line. They said that would make them free of sticks for the next season. Some longhorns took fever even as far north as Illinois. It didn’t make Texas popular.
“Now, when you get north of 36—here’s where it runs—you have only got the Salt Fork of the Arkansas between you and the main Arkansas. It comes out of Kansas not so very far from where you’ll hit the Kansas line.”
“Yes: when you get up in there you’re coming into the edge of a thousand miles of open range, the best cattle ground out of doors; and there isn’t a cow in it from one end to the other. That country’s waiting for cows. It needs them as much as our cows need a market.
“Well, you’ll find out all these things as you come to them.”