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Updated: July 5, 2025
The result was financial ruin to many drovers, and even augured a lighter drive north the coming spring. Early in the winter I bought two brands of cattle in Erath County, paying half cash and getting six months' time on the remainder. Both brands occupied the same range, and when we gathered them in the early spring, they counted out a few over six thousand animals.
The papers having been thus proved satisfactory, the drovers started their boys with the bullocks, before giving their attention to the packing up of their camp baggage, and we turned to our own affairs.
I saw him but two hours ago, and he told me that he was daily expecting a lot of cattle from the north; and that he intended to send them on, without delay, to Carlisle. If you say to him that you have seen me, and that I recommended you to call on him, and see if he wanted any drovers to aid in taking them down; I doubt not he will take you on, unless he has already engaged men."
The fellows were as like as two peas: as like as the two drovers Sim and Candlish had been: you might put them both at forty; grizzled men, pursed about the eyes with seafaring.
Sheriff Wherry informed me that the only move attempted on the part of the shorthorn drovers was the arrest of Sponsilier and myself, on the charge of being accomplices in the shooting of one of their men on the North Platte. But the sheriff had assured the gentlemen that our detention would have no effect on quarantining their cattle, and the matter was taken under advisement and dropped.
Long before our midnight had come, the camp was sleeping a deep, sound sleep those who were not on watch a dreamless sleep, for the bullocks were peaceful and ruminating, the Chinese drovers having been "excused" from duty lest other beasts should stray during "some one's" watch.
Nor was the calm indifference with which their drovers received the compliments shouted at them by passing Imperialists one whit less admirable. And in the general chorus of favourable criticism favourable because they were cheap, probably, if not exactly "gift" animals nobody looked the cattle in the mouth.
But how will they manage to get clear away without the proper drovers finding which way they have gone?" asked Rupert, who had been straining his ears to discover the route taken by the men who had just ridden past. "Here comes Rockefeller. I say, Nealie, let me ride a little way after those men and find out which way they have gone? It is a bit lighter now.
The bullocks, exhausted, go with drooping heads through the noisy streets, and look indifferently at what they see for the first and last time in their lives. The tattered drovers walk after them, their heads drooping too.
So when the devil was sick the devil a monk would be; and if there was any advantage in taking the contrary view to the one entertained by all drovers, so long as our herds were free, we were not like men who could not experience a change of opinion, if in doing so the wind was tempered to us. Also in this instance we were fighting an avowed enemy, and all is fair in love and war.
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