Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Cheyenne and Laramie became common words now, and drovers spoke as wisely of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had mentioned those of the Red River or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail pause in its irresistible push to the north until it had found the last of the five great transcontinental lines, far in the British provinces.
"Well," he went on, lighting a cigarette, unheeding the growls of the drovers, who were trying to get the sheep to pass the car, "well, as I was sayin', Henery went to England, and he got a car. Do you know wot he got?" "No, I don't." "'E got a ninety," said Alfred slowly, giving time for the words to soak in. "A ninety! What do you mean?"
He had been lost over a year, when one day the shepherd, being out on the down with his flock, stood watching two drovers travelling with a flock on the turnpike road below, nearly a mile away, and by and by hearing one of their dogs bark he knew at that distance that it was his dog. "I haven't a doubt," he said to himself, "and if I know his bark he'll know my whistle."
The proposition was a simple one, the maturing and marketing of beeves; we had made a success of the firm's beef ranch in the Cherokee Outlet, and as far as human foresight went, all things augured for a profitable future. There was no intention on the part of the old firm to retire from the enviable position that we occupied as trail drovers.
The young fellow talked more freely of himself, his mother, his circumstances. "Just because I'm in a bank the Merchants' and Drovers' in Amarillo doesn't mean that I'm wealthy," laughed Pratt Sanderson. "They don't give me any great salary, and I couldn't afford this vacation if it wasn't for the extra work I did through the cattle-shipping season and the kindness of our president.
Just as they had "beck-becked" and bumped in their saddles with the Chinese drovers, so they imitated every action that caught their fancy, and almost every human being that crossed their path riding with feet outspread after meeting one traveller; with toes turned in, in imitation of another; flopping, or sitting rigidly in their saddles, imitating actions of hand and turns of the head; anything to amuse themselves, from riding side-saddle to climbing trees.
He spent five years in driving cattle from Putnam County to New York for sale, but failed to make any money at the business. In 1820, he removed to New York, and established his headquarters at the famous Bull's Head Tavern, in the Bowery, which was the great resort of the butchers and drovers doing business in the city.
Messrs Williamson and Reid were the great Aberdeen butchers at that period, and the feeders had either to sell to them or send their cattle on to Barnet Fair on their own account, or in the hands of the jobber. The journey occupied a month, and hay was their food. The cattle stood the road best upon hay, and it was surprising how fresh and sound the drovers took them up.
When a man came down out of the mountains looking dusty and gaunt as the stranger did, there was no marvel in the matter of his eating five cans of cove oysters. The one unaccountable thing about it was that Saul Chadron, president of the Drovers' Association, should sit there at the table and urge the lank, lean starveling to go his limit.
He'll go on towards the main road, but when he meets his picket that nobody like us two has passed, he'll come back and try the Drovers' Track." "He didn't suspect," insisted the girl. "We'll bank on that, then," said Dick, " if we can find a bush or a ditch to hide in."
Word Of The Day