ce parental
reproach had taken passage in a coast schooner for Galveston, Texas.
Then by easy stages he drifted westward, and at last, to his liking,
found a home at Las Palomas. He made himself a useful man on the ranch,
but, not having been bred to the occupation and with a tendency to
waywardness, gave a rather free rein to the vagabond spirit which
possessed him. He was a good rider, even for a country where every
one was a born horseman, but the use of the rope was an art he never
attempted to master.

With the conclusion of the holiday festivities and on the return of the
absentees, a feature, new to me in cattle life, presented itself--hide
hunting. Freighters who brought merchandise from the coast towns to the
merchants of the interior were offering very liberal terms for return
cargoes. About the only local product was flint hides, and of these
there were very few, but the merchant at Shepherd's Ferry offered so
generous inducements that Uncle Lance investigated the matter; the
result was his determination to rid his range of the old, logy,
worthless bulls. Heretofore they had been allowed to die of old age, but
ten cents a pound for flint hides was an encouragement to remove these
cumberers of the range, and turn them to some profit. So we were ordered
to kill every bull on the ranch over seven years old.

In our round-up for branding, we had driven to the home range all
outside cattle indiscriminately. They were still ranging near, so that
at the commencement of this work nearly all the bulls in our brand were
watering from the Nueces. These old residenter bulls never ranged over
a mile away from water, and during the middle of the day they could be
found along the river bank. Many of them were ten to twelve years old,
and were as useless on the range as drones in autumn to a colony of
honey-bees. Las Palomas boasted quite an arsenal of firearms, of every
make and pattern, from a musket to a repeater. The outfit was divided
into two squads, one going down nearly to Shepherd's, and the other
beginning operations considerably above the Ganso. June Deweese took the
down-river end, while Uncle Lance took some ten of us with one wagon on
the up-river trip. To me this had all the appearance of a picnic. But
the work proved to be anything but a picnic. To make the kill was most
difficult. Not willing to leave the carcasses near the river, we usually
sought the bulls coming in to water; but an ordinary charge of pow