Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/69

 for a ton than one hide of the lost thousands would have brought.

Eudora had not been at home the winter of the disastrous kill on the Kansas range, but she had heard the story so often, she knew the savage harshness of those winter storms so well, the picture of the great tragedy was as plain in her vision as if she had witnessed it.

For weeks the range had been buried under snow. Cattle had been held in such shelter as ravines and creeks offered in that peculiarly unsheltered country until the urge of starvation drove them to break restraint and drift before the bitter wind. Slowly they had marched in their misery, devouring every shrub that protruded above the drifts, lean and staggering, shaggy with icicles, the hollows of their gaunt bodies filled with snow.

Southward the great drift of starving cattle had moved, herd merged with herd, out of all human bounds; windlashed, snow-harried, dim, gaunt figures in the greatest tragedy that ever had devastated the Kansas range. They lodged against railroad fences and died, heaped like tumbleweed that scurries before the autumn wind; staggered against wire fences of homesteads and died; plodded grimly, despairingly, silently, into villages, where they stood in the shelter of houses and died, their carcases so attenuated, so fleshless and dry, that even the wolves refused the banquet which the elements spread abroad with such cruel prodigality.

Matt Ellison had lost above forty-five hundred head. By heroic effort he had hauled hay to a few hundred head which his cowboys held in the valley of the little river