conducted with the utmost secrecy. Options
had been taken on all scrip voted to corporations in the State and
still in their possession, agents of the syndicate were stationed at
all centres where any amount was afloat, and on a given day throughout
the State every certificate on the market was purchased. The next
morning land scrip was worth fifty dollars a section, and on my return
one hundred dollars a certificate was being freely bid, while every
surveyor in the State was working night and day locating lands for
individual holders of scrip.

This condition of affairs was largely augmented by a boom in sheep.
San Antonio was the leading wool market in the State, many clips
having sold as high as forty cents a pound for several years past on
the streets of that city. Free range and the high price of wool was
inviting every man and his cousin to come to Texas and make his
fortune. Money was feverish for investment in sheep, flock-masters
were buying land on which to run their bands, and a sheepman was an
envied personage. Up to this time there had been little or no occasion
to own the land on which the immense flocks grazed the year round, yet
under existing cheap prices of land nearly all the watercourses in the
immediate country had been taken up. Personally I was dumfounded at
the sudden and unexpected change of affairs, and what nettled me most
was that all the land adjoining my ranch had been filed on within the
past month. The Clear Fork valley all the way up to Fort Griffin had
been located, while every vacant acre on the mother Brazos, as far
north as Belknap, was surveyed and recorded. I was mortified to think
that I had been asleep, but then the change had come like a thief
in the night. My wife's trunk was half full of scrip, I had had a
surveyor on the ground only a year before, and now the opportunity had
passed.

But my disappointment was my wife's delight, as there was no longer
any necessity for keeping secret our holdings in land scrip. The
little tin trunk held a snug fortune, and next to the babies, my
wife took great pride in showing visitors the beautiful lithographed
certificates. My ambition was land and cattle, but now that the scrip
had a cash value, my wife took as much pride in those vouchers as if
the land had been surveyed, recorded, and covered with our own herds.
I had met so many reverses that I was grateful for any smile of
fortune, and bore my disappointment with becoming grace. My r