drum rotated, creating the illusion of motion.]

They were rolling southward on the International [36]. The timber was
huddling into little, dense green motts at rare distances before the
inundation of the downright, vert prairies. This was the land of the
ranches; the domain of the kings of the kine.

[FOOTNOTE 36: International--The International and Great Northern
Railroad (I. & G. N.) plays a prominent role in
many of O. Henry's stories. It was one of the
great early railroads of Texas, beginning in
the northeast corner of the state and gradually
extending southwestward almost 600 miles, reaching
Rockdale by 1873, Austin by 1876, then San Antonio,
and eventually the Mexican border at Laredo in
1881. Later it became part of the Missouri Pacific
system.]

McGuire sat, collapsed into his corner of the seat, receiving with
acid suspicion the conversation of the cattleman. What was the "game"
of this big "geezer" who was carrying him off? Altruism would have
been McGuire's last guess. "He ain't no farmer," thought the captive,
"and he ain't no con man, for sure. W'at's his lay? You trail in,
Cricket, and see how many cards he draws. You're up against it,
anyhow. You got a nickel and gallopin' consumption, and you better
lay low. Lay low and see w'at's his game."

At Rincon, a hundred miles from San Antonio, they left the train for a
buckboard which was waiting there for Raidler. In this they travelled
the thirty miles between the station and their destination [37].
If anything could, this drive should have stirred the acrimonious
McGuire to a sense of his ransom. They sped upon velvety wheels
across an exhilarant savanna. The pair of Spanish ponies struck a
nimble, tireless trot, which gait they occasionally relieved by a wild,
untrammelled gallop. The air was wine and seltzer, perfumed, as they
absorbed it, with the delicate redolence of prairie flowers. The road
perished, and the buckboard swam the uncharted billows of the grass
itself, steered by the practised hand of Raidler, to whom each tiny
distant mott of trees was a signboard, each convolution of the low
hills a voucher of course and distance. But McGuire reclined upon his
spine, seeing nothing but a desert, and receiving the cattleman's
advances with sullen distrust. "W'at's h