Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/58

 sustained. In McPacken they were young men, mainly; car repairers, wipers, switchmen, machinists, brakemen and firemen, who had a pride in their calling, a glowing satisfaction in their generally hard name.

On the other hand there were the cowhands, as the men who followed the herds were commonly called in and around the town. Several hundred of them could have been rounded up within a three-days' ride of McPacken, youngsters full of cayenne and vinegar, with a snort and go to them such as free youth has in any calling, anywhere. There was a sprinkling of older men among them, hardy, wiry ones who had ridden the long trail from Texas to Montana, following slow herds over perilous ways.

Things were coming easier to the cowboy gentry in those McPacken days. The railroad was no longer a thousand miles away; lights and liquids were within three or four days' ride, at the farthest. These encroachments of civilization had shown their influence on the cowboy habit, which was growing somewhat gentler, due to frequent breaks, perhaps, in the long periods of drouth, or maybe coming of the fact that something easy to procure is no longer ardently desired. Whatever the cause, the effect was apparent to the older citizens of McPacken, who had recollections of times not very far back when those yelping revellers made night a torture in the town.

Altogether, the effect of business methods, which were supplanting the old-time make-or-lose gamble of cattle raising, were showing amazing results, not alone