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Updated: June 14, 2025
Orcutt's glance rested meaningly, for an instant, on the Easterner at the table. Overland grinned. Orcutt spoke to the young Easterner, who immediately rose to his feet and bowed. "You was lookin' for somebody that's the real thing, you said. This here's my friend Jack Summers. He used to be sheriff of Abilene once. He ain't workin' for a movin'-picture outfit and he won't borrow your watch.
Abilene was abandoned, yet a rival to Wichita had sprung up at Ellsworth, some sixty-five miles west of the former market, on the Kansas Pacific Railway. The railroads were competing for the cattle traffic, each one advertising its superior advantages to drovers, shippers, and feeders. I was impartial, but as Wichita was fully one hundred miles the nearest, my cattle were turned for that point.
I had previously settled my indebtedness in Comanche County by remittances from Abilene, and early in the fall I made up an outfit to go down and gather the remnant of "Lazy L" cattle.
In the mean time I was not idle. By the first of July it was known that three hundred thousand cattle would be the minimum of the summer's drive to Abilene. My extensive acquaintance among buyers made my services of value to new drovers. A commission of twenty-five cents a head was offered me for effecting sales.
If I stood next to a man at a bar he'd edge off and give a Baldwin-Ziegler look as if he suspected me of having the North Pole concealed on my person. I began to wish that I'd gone to Abilene or Waco for my paseado; for the mayor of them places will drink with you, and the first citizen you meet will tell you his middle name and ask you to take a chance in a raffle for a music box.
Certain handy gun-slingers would come with him from Kansas City and Abilene, friends of Peden who had made reputations and had no scruples about maintaining them. As the night lengthened this feeling of security, of pleasurable anticipation, increased. This little break in its life would do the town good; things would whirl away with recharged energy when the doors were opened again.
I simply mention this to give some idea of the men of that day, willing to back their opinions, even on trivial matters, with their lives. "I'm the quickest man on the trigger that ever came over the trail," said a cowpuncher to me one night in a saloon in Abilene. "You're a blankety blank liar," said a quiet little man, a perfect stranger to both of us, not even casting a glance our way.
Why, when I wasn't big enough to make a hand with the herd, only ten years old, in the days when we drove to Abilene, they used to send me in the lead with an old cylinder gun to shoot at the buffalo and scare them off the trail. And I've made the trip every year since.
Then I want you to be on the lookout for a chance to drive cattle for somebody going West. We'll find chances enough, and we'll strike for Abilene and your uncle's place. I haven't money enough to carry me out there on the train. Oh! won't it be good fun when we have a good horse apiece and go riding across the plains herding the longhorns! That's life, that is!
"Shanghai" Pierce had for some time been a prominent figure in the markets of Abilene and Wichita, driving herds of his own from the extreme coast country. But our market required a better quality than coasters and Mexican cattle, and we turned back up the country.
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