Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/17

 only to work its profit and contribute to its strength. Where herds formerly came to be loaded into trains, they arrived now on board of trains, to be dispersed among a hardy set of business adventurers known as feeders. These cattle were pastured along the broad river valley and brought to perfection for the butcher's block. On their day they were driven again to McPacken, loaded and shipped, their going and coming, their stay between, all leaving an accretion of profit in the town.

That was the reason for McPacken, and that was the way it grew. All that was not so very long ago as time runs under the bridges along the Arkansas. There are men still stumping around who rode after those long-horned herds of strangers from the Nueces as young chaps, able yet to take care of a man's ration of steak with their own teeth. Some of them have foreheads extending to their crowns by now; many are grizzled and whiskered, and galled by the saddle of time, but most of them are going strong. Measured by events, it was a long time ago, for things move fast along the Arkansas; counted back by leap-years, not far.

At the time this parting in the pages of McPacken's history is made, to show who cares to move up a chair and read the chapter so offered, the town was at its greatest consequence and prosperity as a center of the native and imported cattle industry. It was the hub of a wide sweep of open range, into which only a few daring adventurers had pushed forward with fence and plow. These homesteads were mainly along the