“No one ever heard of it. It’s head of the rails on the Kansas Pacific, the new road that’s building west. They want cattle. They are promising a market.”
“Yes. The railroads are planning to run up the Arkansas the same as up the Platte—and that’s done, now. That whole country north of here, from all I can hear about it, is a thousand by two thousand miles of natural cow land. Grass? They tell me that farther on west there’s millions of acres of what they call buffalo grass—short, like our grama. Maybe it won’t carry cows, but some say it will. It certainly fattens the buffalo. And there isn’t a cow in it all; it’s empty and waiting for range stock—to say nothing of the Eastern demand.”
“We know we could herd as far as Wichita. Shore we could get from there to Aberlene.”
“Yes,” said this prophet of a new day; “and we would find Eastern buyers—farmers and feeders and beef men—waiting to buy our stuff as fast as we drove it through.”
“Really?” Taisie Lockhart almost forgot her morning’s troubles. “Really?”
“Why, yes, I reckon it’s true, from what the men told me that came down to cut the trail in the Nations. They declare there’ll be buyers for all we can drive, up to a hundred thousand head—yes, two-three hundred thousand!”
Inarticulate sound came in Anastasie’s throat. She cast a triumphant glance at her foreman.
“Well, now, ma’am, how was I to know?” defended Jim. “I never did hear of no Aberlene, not in my whole life, till this young gentleman rid in here this morning.”
“Well, you ought to have heard of it!” rejoined his employer with a woman’s logic. “Why, man, that’s what all Texas has been starving for for years! Didn’t I tell you? Haven’t I been telling you? Haven’t I been begging you to make a herd and drive north, somewhere, and trust to God to find buyers there, since there’s no hope here, south or east? Haven’t I told you, Jim?”
“I reckon you did, ma’am,” admitted her aid. “Same time, you didn’t know a damned thing about it.”
“Oh, you!” Taisie turned to him. “Do you expect to have people show you what’s in their hands before you draw cards? Can’t you take a chance?”
“For my own self, yes, Miss Taisie. For you—we all was scared. Especial we was scared when you said you was going along.”