s mind pictured two boys of somewhere round eighteen years of age
setting forth from the little home town of Kansas City, nestling at the
confluence of the Missouri and the Kaw. A year later Cal Warren was
whacking bulls on the Santa Fe Trail while the other, William Harris,
was holding the reins over four plunging horses as he tooled a
lumbering Concord stage over the trail from Omaha to the little camp
called Denver.

It was five years before their trails crossed again. Cal Warren was
the first of the two to wed, and he had established a post along the
trail, a rambling structure of 'dobe, poles and sod, and there
conducted the business of "Two for One," a calling impossible and
unknown in any other than that day and place.

The long bull trains were in sight from horizon to horizon every hour
of the day. The grind of the gravel wore down the hoofs of the unshod
oxen, and when footsore they could not go on. One sound bull for two
with tender feet was Warren's rule of trade. These crippled ones were
soon made sound in the puddle pen, a sod corral flooded with sufficient
water to puddle the yellow clay into a six-inch layer of stiff, healing
mud, then thrown out on the open range to fatten and grow strong. But
transitions were swift and sweeping. Steel rails were crowding close
behind the prairie schooners and the ox-bows. Bull trains grew fewer
every year and eventually Cal Warren made his last trade of two for one.

Bill Harris had come back to view the railroad of which he had heard so
much and he remained to witness and to be a part of the wild days of
Abilene, Hays and Dodge, as each attained the apex of its glory as the
railroad's end and the consequent destination of the Texas trail herds.
The sight of these droves of thousands implanted a desire to run cows
himself and when he was wed in Dodge he broached this project to his
boyhood pal.

It was the sincere wish of each to gain the other as a partner in all
future enterprise, but this was not to be. Warren had seen the bottom
drop out of the bull trade and he would not relinquish the suspicion
that any business dealing in four-footed stock was hazardous in the
extreme and he insisted that the solution of all their financial
problems rested upon owning land, not cows. Harris could not be
induced to farm the soil while steers were selling round eight dollars
a head.

Warren squatted on a quarter of land. Harris bought a few head of
she-stock and g