Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/18

 river, the occupants of them looked upon with a curious, questioning interest, not wholly unsympathetic, as people who lent themselves to some heroic, but misguided, experimentation, out of which little good to themselves or humanity at large could come.

This was the attitude toward all agricultural adventurers in the valley of the Arkansas at that time, shared by cattlemen and town dwellers alike. There was no hostility, no unfriendliness. Everybody would have been glad to see them succeed, but nobody expected them to do so. Their low sod houses were lonely markers to the cowboys who rode from distant ranges to McPacken; their struggles with oxen and lank teams against the tenacious sod a never-ending source of mild entertainment for those rovers of the prairies, who twisted in their saddles to look back as they galloped on to the town's delights.

Agriculture, it will be seen, then, did not contribute anything of consequence to the prosperity of McPacken in those days. The little which the people who followed that industry bought and sold in the town would not have been missed if it had been withdrawn entirely, for McPacken did not look to the earth for its supplies. It was a place that lived out of tin cans and bottles, and threw them down in the back yard when it had emptied them.

The railroad had established a division point there, with shops for emergency repairs to cars and engines, a roundhouse for stabling and grooming the steeds of the iron trail, and a system of water works to serve