Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/16

 shrieking flange on curve, grinding brake-shoe against laboring wheel; scents of an industry to which men one knew and met on the street laid their hands, home-binding, intimate smells such as only cattle trains leave after them to speak of another sort of opulence, truly occidental. For McPacken was a town that had been established on cattle, and grown on cattle, and filled its stores and banks and homes and barber shops on cattle, from the very time that it welcomed the first dusty herd from Texas to its pens.

McPacken had lived and done well on the distinction of being the last loading-point to which Texas cattle were driven into Kansas for shipment to eastern markets. It had not been permitted to boast long of this peculiar favor of changing conditions. The day of the Texas cattlemen who brought their beef to the northern shipping-points on foot across a thousand miles of dusty trails, foraging them on the country as they passed, had come to an end shortly after the founding of McPacken on the Arkansas. The railroads had gone to Texas after the cattlemen's business, and the business of others along the way. Contrary to the expectations of everybody, the town did not die with the passing of the last driven herd.

Texas cattle had been brought to Kansas to fatten on its peculiarly succulent grass for many years before McPacken, and the railroad upon which it lay, graced that illimitable land. McPacken was a dot in the very center of the richest grazing country; chance had put it down at a place where each succeeding change seemed