f
co'se," she added argumentatively, "we all got to keep up the
reppytation o' ouah cookin'. I kain't ask these yer men a dollah a
meal--not fer no lean ole hen wif no meat ontoe her bones--no, ma'am."

Aunt Lucy spoke with professional pride and with a certain right to
authority. The reputation of the Halfway House ran from the Double
Forks of the Brazos north to Abilene, and much of the virtue of the
table was dependent upon the resources of this "hen ranch," whose fame
was spread abroad throughout the land. Saved by the surpassing grace
of pie and "chicken fixings," the halting place chosen for so slight
reason by Buford and his family had become a permanent abode, known
gratefully to many travellers and productive of more than a living for
those who had established it. It was, after all, the financial genius
of Aunt Lucy, accustomed all her life to culinary problems, that had
foreseen profit in eggs and chickens when she noted the exalted joy
with which the hungry cow-punchers fell upon a meal of this sort after
a season of salt pork, tough beef, and Dutch-oven bread.

At first Major Buford rebelled at the thought of innkeeping. His
family had kept open house before the war, and he came from a land
where the thoughts of hospitality and of price were not to be mentioned
in the same day. Yet all about him lay the crude conditions of a raw,
new country. At best he could get no product from the land for many
months, and then but a problematical one. He was in a region where
each man did many things, and first that thing which seemed nearest at
hand to be done. It was the common sense of old Aunt Lucy which
discovered the truth of the commercial proposition that what a man will
pay for a given benefit is what he ought to pay. Had Aunt Lucy asked
the cow-punchers even twice her tariff for a pie they would have paid
it gladly. Had Mary Ellen asked them for their spurs and saddles, the
latter would have been laid down.

From the Halfway House south to the Red River there was nothing edible.
And over this Red River there came now swarming uncounted thousands of
broad-horned cattle, driven by many bodies of hardy, sunburned,
beweaponed, hungry men. At Ellisville, now rapidly becoming an
important cattle market, the hotel accommodations were more pretentious
than comfortable, and many a cowman who had sat at the board of the
Halfway House going up the trail, would mount his horse and ride back
daily twenty-five