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 and arriving at her wise conclusions, the nearest of the five cattle trains was still a hundred miles distant from McPacken. On top of this train, back a few cars from the engine to give the cinders a chance to cool before they hit him, a young man was sitting, his prodpole between his knees, watching the Kansas landscape as the train jogged by.

Tom Laylander was favorably impressed by the state. They had left the region of elms and maples along the streams, the dark-green fields of corn, and mellow stubble-lands where wheat shocks stood amazingly thick, it seemed to him, accustomed to the thin yields of that sandy postoak land beyond the Brazos. Now they were passing through a paradise of prairies, big enough, it seemed, to pasture all the starving herds between the Panhandle and the Big Bend. It was an empty country, as far as he could see, shaggy with gray-green short grass, heaved in gently-rounded hills that looked like the backs of gigantic buffalo. It looked like a place where a man might turn out his herd with nobody to set bounds to his coming and going.

Tom Laylander knew that it was not so; that men of his calling had all that country under their control, in one way or another; that bounds were set and respected, and that a stranger with five hundred-odd starving cattle, such as the thirty cars in that train of his contained, must go where he was apportioned and pay what he was asked. Better than starving down on the Brazos, he reflected; better than hanging on there,