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BLANCOCITO had dozed in the sun for a considerable interval. Hearing a sound at the front door, he turned an idle eye, and sprang back with a snort at sight of the unusual apparition which now descended the gallery steps—Anastasie Lockhart, no longer in male apparel, and by the merest accident coming out of the house as the two men would now have entered.

Jim Nabours was not accustomed to social formulas.

“Miss Taisie, this here is Mr. McMasters, of Gonzales, below. He’s sher’f down there. I reckon you know who he is.”

“I saw you when you came in, sir,” said the mistress of Del Sol demurely, extending her hand. “Why did you not come up to breakfast?”

While McMasters, his eyes fixed on hers, was explaining his travel-worn condition, Jim Nabours was wondering how and why in the name of all the saints of the Southwest Taisie had managed in so short a time to change from her daily ranch costume to this feminine marvel of fresh lawn, with ruffled flounces and great belled skirt. She even had white mitts—yellow-white with age. But Taisie saw no reason to explain that much of her apparel once had been her mother’s, and was now fresh resurrected. Jim did not know the mysteries of a certain rawhide chest so well as old black Milly, who had served in the Burleson Lockhart family before they moved into the border country. Had he known he might also have had a guess at the miracle of Taisie’s heavy hair, no longer banded like an Indian woman’s but done up in some sort of high twisted mass that left visible the milk-white nape of a neck not always otherwise protected against the sun.

In good truth Anastasie—such was her mother’s Louisiana name in baptism, and her own—was not unmindful of the ways of woman in older lands, in spite of the surroundings into which fate had cast her. And truly she was beautiful—rarely, astonishingly, confusingly beautiful. The man did not live who could have seen her now and not have felt his heart leap to joy in the universe and its ways.

She led them back into the house. Her very presence filled the low-ceiled room, one of the two at the right of the four corners made by the right-angled double halls. The adobe ranch house of Del Sol was built like others of the Saxon Southwest, so that each breath of air might be caught from any direction of the wind; an arrangement cooler than a patio for a house surrounded on two sides by a grove of giant live oaks draped heavily in Spanish moss.

The interior gave a rude setting for a picture such as this young woman made. The ease and luxury of lower Louisiana, for a wealthy generation of sugar-cane planters the repository of Europe’s best art and last luxuries, were not reflected in the first Saxon generation of the Texas border. True, the furniture in part was traceable to earlier days. Two paintings, three framed samplers, told of a mother’s hands. There was a heavy claw-foot table. A few mismated chairs of the Empire stood in a row. But a rawhide settee and four splat-bottom chairs frankly admitted the limit of such supplies; the prevailing flavor of the borderland could not be denied. Not so much of a marvel, for at that time there was not a hundred miles of railroad within the boundaries of Texas, and everything from the East must survive the toil and danger of wagon freighting.

In one corner of the room was a conical upright Mexican fireplace. Opposed to this and covered with soft tanned baby-calfskins of varied colors, stood the one thing which had saved the soul of Anastasie Lockhart the first, as of Anastasie the second—the piano, regarded with awe by all the cattle hands. On the piano stood, now, a vase of flowers. They were very fresh flowers. Jim Nabours knew they had not been there an hour earlier, for he had called before breakfast and they were not there then; though he knew Taisie’s garden had some blossoms.

What shall escape the eye of a maiden? Tapered conchas on a bridle strap, neat boots, a well-shaped hat, a way of sitting in a saddle, the air of a family that had once come down from Tennessee on the Natchez Trace and the Old River Road, to Louisiana, to Texas? Nay, not so easily are a maid’s eyes baffled, though she shall have had but a single look at a newcome young man opening her gate a hundred yards away. Hence these flowers, hence this frock, the reason for which Jim Nabours could not analyze.

Mr. Dan McMasters, new sheriff of Gonzales, mighty young for that job, was a proper man. A vague sense of uneasiness came to the soul of Foreman Jim as he saw his comeliness and ease of manner. He felt he had been betrayed—did not feel familiar with these new little ways.

“You see, Miss Lockhart,” went on McMasters when he had taken his own seat on the cowhide settee, “I’ve been north, up the Indian roads. As I was only fifty miles away, I thought I would ride in.”

“You are very welcome, sir. Our families always have been friends.”

The voice of Anastasie Lockhart was the color of her hair. Almost, you could call her hair vibrant.

“Yes, my family always has known your family. I wanted to see you once more. That must have been my main reason. You—you have grown, Miss Lockhart. I’d not have known you. But just now I was talking with your segundo. He thought you might like to hear some word I am bringing down to Texas from the North.”

“He means they’ve started a cattle market up North on the railroad, Miss Taisie,” broke in Jim Nabours.

“Market? There’s going to be a shipping point—do you mean that, sir?” The girl turned swiftly.

“I think so, yes,” replied Dan McMasters. “It’s at Abilene, in Kansas, right north of Wichita. You see, Wichita’s not far across the Kansas line, above the Nations.”

“Abilene?”

“No one ever heard of it. It’s head of the rails on the Kansas Pacific, the new road that’s building west. They want cattle. They are promising a market.”

The girl’s eyes kindled.

“That’s news!”

He nodded.

“Yes. The railroads are planning to run up the Arkansas the same as up the Platte—and that’s done, now. That whole country north of here, from all I can hear about it, is a thousand by two thousand miles of natural cow land. Grass? They tell me that farther on west there’s millions of acres of what they call buffalo grass—short, like our grama. Maybe it won’t carry cows, but some say it will. It certainly fattens the buffalo. And there isn’t a cow in it all; it’s empty and waiting for range stock—to say nothing of the Eastern demand.”

Nabours broke in.

“We know we could herd as far as Wichita. Shore we could get from there to Aberlene.”

“Yes,” said this prophet of a new day; “and we would find Eastern buyers—farmers and feeders and beef men—waiting to buy our stuff as fast as we drove it through.”

“Really?” Taisie Lockhart almost forgot her morning’s troubles. “Really?”

“Why, yes, I reckon it’s true, from what the men told me that came down to cut the trail in the Nations. They declare there’ll be buyers for all we can drive, up to a hundred thousand head—yes, two-three hundred thousand!”

Inarticulate sound came in Anastasie’s throat. She cast a triumphant glance at her foreman.

“Well, now, ma’am, how was I to know?” defended Jim. “I never did hear of no Aberlene, not in my whole life, till this young gentleman rid in here this morning.”

“Well, you ought to have heard of it!” rejoined his employer with a woman’s logic. “Why, man, that’s what all Texas has been starving for for years! Didn’t I tell you? Haven’t I been telling you? Haven’t I been begging you to make a herd and drive north, somewhere, and trust to God to find buyers there, since there’s no hope here, south or east? Haven’t I told you, Jim?”

“I reckon you did, ma’am,” admitted her aid. “Same time, you didn’t know a damned thing about it.”

“Oh, you!” Taisie turned to him. “Do you expect to have people show you what’s in their hands before you draw cards? Can’t you take a chance?”

“For my own self, yes, Miss Taisie. For you—we all was scared. Especial we was scared when you said you was going along.”

“But I am going along! And I am going to put up a herd!”

“Now, Miss Lockhart,” ventured Dan McMasters, “you couldn’t do that. Your men can put up a herd and drive north for you, but no woman ever has gone north of the Red, or ever ought to try it. There’s no real trail—it’s all wild north of here for fifteen hundred miles or more. There’s not a bridge—I’ve swum ten rivers and forded a hundred. There are Indians. There are storms—and no shelter for you. Miss Lockhart, there’s not a man in Texas ever would let you go.”

“There’s not men enough in all Texas to keep me from going!”

Taisie’s grief was entirely forgotten now.

“Even your father——” Jim began.

“Don’t!” Sudden tears came to the girl’s eyes.

“She allus bogs down—about her father,” explained Nabours.

“I’ll not bog down! I’ll get over this some day. Why, the reason I want to go north is to find the man that did it! He’s somewhere up there.”

McMasters, captain in the Rangers, looked at her with a sudden kindling of his own cool eyes; but he said nothing. The mistress of Del Sol stamped her foot in its cross-banded slipper.

“Always you treat me like a girl. I’m not!”

“Yes, you are, Miss Taisie,” rejoined Jim Nabours. “You’re a girl, and I’m your mother and your father both, till you get a new segundo.”

“Listen at him!” Taisie turned to the young stranger. “The whole state of Texas is dying on its feet, and the men of Texas scared to drive, with maybe five dollars a head waiting for them at the railroad! That’s riches!

“How long would it take?” she demanded of her informant.

“All season, practically,” replied McMasters. “I rode about forty miles a day, coming south, and I was eleven hundred miles away at one time. Cows could go ten miles a day, maybe, if you could keep the herd going; say two-three hundred miles a month. Say three-four months—that would cover a heap of trail.”

“All the distance between here and heaven! All the difference between poverty and self-respect! Oh!”—she looked him fair in the face—“it’s no use to pretend! Do you know what I did this very morning, sir, just before you rode in? Do you know why I’m crying now? I can’t help it. Why, I was down there to tell my men that I’d turned them all loose this morning. I discharged them all. I told them I was broke, that I couldn’t pay my hands.

“Poor? Don’t I know! Go back to Gonzales and tell your people that the last Lockhart’s down in the dust. I’ve got no pride left at all, because I’m broke. Do you wonder that I cry?”

“She did!” said Jim Nabours. “She is!”

McMasters turned away and looked out the window. The tears of such a woman made one thing no man could face.

“But, of course,” added the foreman, “I taken all that in my own hands. I just sont the hands out like usual. Seems like I can hear the irons sizzling on about a dozen long ears by now already.”

“And the lot not worth a pinch of old Milly’s snuff!” commented Taisie. “The market—that’s the one thing! Mr. McMasters has brought news!”

“I almost hesitate over it,” said the young man. “I can’t bring it free of risk and danger.”

“You don’t know my men!” broke out Taisie proudly.

“Oh, yes, I do! I know us all, ma’am. They—we would all die first. But suppose that was not enough?”

“And if I’m a woman, at least I’m not an old woman. I’ll drive the first Texas herd to the railroad with my own men if it takes our last horse and last man! It’s north for me, or I’m gone. When you rode in, sir, I was at the lowest ebb of all my life.”

“I wish the tide may turn, Miss Lockhart,” said young Dan McMasters quietly.

“It will—I believe it has!” She was on her feet, her eyes bright, her color up. “Why, listen! I’ll take Anita and Milly both along. We’ve two carretas left. Jim, you old coward”—her hand was on his shoulder affectionately—“you know you told me you could make a herd of five thousand fours in our brand inside of a day’s ride from Del Sol. Even if it was beeves——

“Tell me, what ages?” She turned suddenly to McMasters.

“I can’t say yet,” was his reply. “Fours and long threes would do best for shipping East. But the talk I heard is that there’ll be use for stockers—even yearlings, too, because the range is open all in north and west of there. People are crowding out to the buffalo range, following the railroads. It’s unbelievable how crazy they are. It seems as though they felt they just have got to get West. They’ll all need cattle.”

A new expression came to his face as he went on:

“There’s millions of acres of unbroken land up there, north of the old slavery line of 36-30. It will take North and South both to make it. It will be the West! It will be the heart of America!”

“We’ll be the first to see it! There’s no age from calf to fifty years Del Sol can’t drive!” said Taisie Lockhart decisively. “How many?”

“That depends on your force of hands. Some said three thousand head was around what a herd should be. A dozen hands could drive it—say fifteen-twenty. Each man ought to have at least six or eight horses in his string. There’ll be riding.”

“Well, what of that? I can turn out twenty men who can talk to cows in their own language. We wouldn’t miss thirty-five hundred fours, Jim says. When shall we start?”

She still was smiling, eager; but the look in her eyes was one of resolution; and as Jim had said, a Lockhart never changed.

“Jesse Chisholm just followed the grass,” answered McMasters presently. “It’s green here in March, and it’s February now. Once across the Colorado and the Brazos, we’d go clean to the Red, easy—I know my father always said that. He said a driver could go in west of Austin and Fort Worth, and get to the north edge of Texas and be almost sure not to see an Indian. The Comanches are away west of that line. We’re about on the ninety-eighth meridian here, and near the thirtieth parallel. My father said that it was a new world north of thirty-six degrees north latitude. That land is all unmapped. No one lives there but the Indians.”

“She eats Comanches,” said Jim Nabours. “Little thing like them don’t bother her none. As for swimming a herd acrost a spring fresh, with quicksand on both sides, why, she don’t mind that none a-tall!”

An ominous silence and a heightened color did not impress him. At length his employer went on, addressing the visitor:

“Very well. Say fifteen men and a wrangler and a cook, with me and black Milly, my cook, and Anita, my Spanish woman. We’d take the two carretas, with oxen for them and the cook’s wagon. Sixteen riders by six or eight horses is a hundred or a hundred and fifty for the remuda—we’d do it easy.”

“Plumb easy!” came Jim’s solemn comment. “A thousand miles in a carreta without a spring, right over a crooked mesquite ex, is right simple. About one week and Milly’d die, her going three hundred net right now; and Anita’d die of homesickness for her jacal she’s used to living in.

“Besides, ma’am”—here the foreman’s voice changed—“I may as well talk plain. Not joking, we can’t live on beef straight. Three-four months of meal and beans and molasses for twenty men is more than we have got, though meal and beans and molasses and side meat we’d have to have, and coffee if we could. The hands work better for coffee, mornings, and after rains or hard rides.”

The color on poor Taisie’s cheeks grew deeper in humiliation. She spread out her hands.

“I’m broke! I’ve said that!”

There was silence for some time. At length the young sheriff of Gonzales spoke quietly.

“Miss Lockhart,” said he, “I don’t like to hear that word in Texas.”

“Truth is the simplest!”

“Yes, I know. But what one ranch in Texas doesn’t happen to have the neighbors do have—they always have had. Take in one or two neighbors with you for the drive—say a thousand head, each brand. They’d be glad to put up the wagon and the remuda. You must not push away your neighbors. This is Texas.”

A cold rage met his sincerity and friendliness.

“I’ll have help from no one! Del Sol will drive a lone herd north, win or lose. I’ll take it all back, Jim—you’re all hired on again, the last man of you. You’ll stand by me? I’ll sell my cows and pay my men; and then I’ll see if there’s any law in the North or any men in the South to help me find a murderer.”

“Ma’am,” said Jim Nabours, “you’ve put it now so’s’t not one of us can help hisself. We got to go. When hell freezes we’ll all walk out on the ice together.

“But you got to thank Mr. McMasters for what he’s done told us, Miss Taisie,” he added. “I reckon he’s our best neighbor.”

“I do thank you, sir!” The girl rose and held out her hand frankly. The young man bent over it. He did not seat himself again. “But you’ll stop a day or so with us?”

“No, I must be riding now,” he answered.

He found his hat, bowed, passed out the door with no dallying or indecision; nor said a word about return. He was abrupt to coldness, if not to rudeness.

Anastasie Lockhart looked through the window shades so intently that her hand remained not fallen after it had drawn them; so intently that she did not hear old Milly as she entered.

“Laws, Miss Taisie, is that young gemman gone? I done brung in some likker fer him. He’s quality, Miss Taisie! Who is he, an’ whah he come from? Is he done ask you about marryin’ yit?”

“Not yet, Milly,” answered Anastasie.

She sat down in the one rocking-chair, staring at the uncarpeted floor. She was older now than she had been an hour ago. Why had this neighbor not promised an early return? And was he not a strangely stiff and silent young man? Were the honors of sheriff and captain so much as to render him superior to a girl with red hair who wore her mother’s clothes, years old?

Anastasie Lockhart, astonishingly vital, astonishingly beautiful, rose to find a mirror so that she could read an answer. As she did so she recognized, standing at the end of the rawhide settee, where her visitor could not have failed to see the sudden disorder of its interior, the rawhide trunk which long had served alike as wardrobe and safety vault for her. Vexed at the revelation of her first untidiness in housekeeping, she bent now to close the heavy lid once more. Suddenly she went to her knees beside it, her eyes wet once more at what she saw of silk and lace gone to bits. She caught up the fragments to her cheeks.

A daguerreotype in its disintegrating frame lay to her hand. She opened it. Her mother. Yes, she had been beautiful. And this frame was the twin of it—her father. She turned it to catch the light so that the likeness would show. A bold, bearded face, aquiline, high. She sighed as she looked at the picture of a man cut down by an assassin in the full of his strength and resolution.

Below these things and others lay to half the depth of the old chest a mass of papers, all similar. Contemptuously she thrust in her hands, her arms, to the elbows.

“Scrip!” she murmured to herself. “Scrip for more Texas land, to raise more Texas cows! He was mad about it—scrip, scrip was all he thought! I only hope that he did not see it!” She meant Dan McMasters. “But of course he did—he couldn’t help it, where he sat.

“Well, it’s no matter,” she added mentally. “He’s not coming back again. If I’d known how cold he was I’d not have troubled!”

She spread out her long brown hands over her mother’s frock as, still kneeling, she sat back on her heels, in her mother’s cross-banded shoes.