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When they arrived at the hotel the boys professed not to know Scrub. "Hello, picked up another kid?" asked Bud. "I swow, yer allers goin' round pickin' up mavericks. I reckon yer aim ter brand this one as well ez ther one yer brought in last night." "Why, here's another kid," said Ben, looking over Scrub's new outfit with interest. "He don't look much like the one you brought in last night.
Otherwise, I'm afraid you'll hear a good deal about that French count, and how hard it is for Helen to have to associate with a lot of mavericks from the Stock Yards, when she might be running with blooded stock on the other side.
But it was painful enough, at that, and every time a shot came out Farley groaned deeper. While they were engaged in this, to them, pleasing occupation, Billy Sudden arrived. "Hello, kid," he said to Farley. "So you got it at last. I could have told you to keep away from Ted Strong and his bunch. They're bad medicine for a herd o' mavericks like you to graze with. You tackled the wrong outfit.
He pointed to the flag that was snap snapping in the evening breeze not ten feet away. It was no more than an ordinary camp marking-flag; but the regiment, always punctilious in matters of millinery, had charged it with the regimental device, the Red Bull, which is the crest of the Mavericks the great Red Bull on a background of Irish green. 'I see, and now I remember. said the lama.
Mavericks, son, is calves which gets sep'rated from the old cows, their mothers, an' ain't been branded none yet. They're bets which the round-ups overlooks, an' don't get marked. Of course, when they drifts from their mothers, each calf for himse'f, an' no brands nor y'ear marks, no one can tell whose calves they be.
And the situation was so serious we were glad to have them go the fewer there were of us the less water we would need. To add to the troubles of the homesteaders, there were increased activities by claim jumpers. Almost equal to the old cattle-rustling gangs were the land rustlers who "covered up" land as the cattle thieves did brands, making mavericks out of branded stock.
More than one big stock-man in Texas began his career by branding the mavericks, or wild unbranded and unclaimed heifers, found in the river timber. As an instance of the manner in which they worked up a herd, it is related of a successful stock-man that he started with a solitary steer, which he turned loose on the prairie, and the first year he branded forty calves!...
The troubles in Wyoming were the results of the efforts of the Wyoming State Live Stock Association to put a check upon rustlers who are tempted to steal by the vast profits afforded. At the time the Association was formed the rustlers were few in number, and confined their acts to branding the mavericks or unbranded yearlings with their own brands.
Men of other regiments came to visit the Mavericks. The Mavericks went visiting on their own account. Their pickets hurried forth to bring them back, met pickets of strange regiments on the same duty; and, after a while, the bugles blew madly for more pickets with officers to control the tumult. The Mavericks had a reputation for liveliness to live up to.
The cattle on the range had for years been running wild, the owners and herdsmen being absent with the Southern army. They had multiplied prodigiously, so that many thousands of mavericks roamed without brand, the property of any one who would round them up and put an iron on their flanks. The money value of them was very little. A standard price for a yearling was a plug of tobacco.
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