of it, at once the pride of its builders and the state toward whose development it had contributed so much.
Texas cattle were still coming on the hoof in those days for Kansas railroads to carry the rest of the way to market, and there were Kansas cattle by hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands more in the Cherokee Nation, for which this road was the most convenient outlet.
For a long distance it ran parallel to the Cherokee Strip, as it was called, not a great way from it as distances were considered in those robust days of driven herds. Hundreds of men were employed along this railroad in big gangs; hundreds rode after cattle on the range. All these nomads—for they were transients, blowing like cottonwood seeds before the winds of chance—sought their highly seasoned diversions in the towns along the line.
Far-scattered towns these were, great stretches of bleak high prairie-lands lying between them. To these the rovers came, bringing their hard-come wages to blow in on one go-easy spree. There was plenty of business in these towns, set so far apart that competition was not felt in any cutting degree, and one of the liveliest, one of the most lurid, profane and altogether outside both statutory and moral law in its day, was Pawnee Bend, the place toward which we have been heading since the very first word.
Things had been put down hastily at Pawnee Bend, its merchants and others who profited on that unstable trade being in a manner camp-followers. They pushed along as the cattle frontier contracted into the dimin-
