breed, or he collides with another
drove, or there is a tremendous mix at a tavern. The facility with which
a cattle man learns to recognise every steer in a drove of hundreds is
an eighth wonder of the world to a stranger. Anyone of us could ride
through a drove of cattle, and when he reached the end know every steer
that followed him in the road, and I have seen a line reaching for
miles.

Easy with your eyebrows, my masters. When men are trained to a craft
from the time they are able to cling to a saddle, they are very apt to
exhibit a skill passing for witchcraft with the uninitiated. I have met
many a grazier, and I have known but one who was unable to recognise the
individual bullock in his drove, and his name was a byword in the Hills.

Jud and the Cardinal followed the drove, and I rode slowly through the
cattle, partly to keep the long line thin, but chiefly to learn the
identity of each steer. I looked for no mark, nor any especial feature
of the bullock, but caught his identity in the total as the head waiter
catches the identity of a hat. I looked down at each bullock for an
instant, and then turned to the next one. In that instant I had the cast
of his individuality forever. The magicians of Pharaoh could not
afterwards mislead me about that bullock. This was not esoteric skill.
Any man in the Hills could do it. Indeed it was a necessity. There was
not a branded bullock in all this cattle land. What need for the
barbaric custom when every man knew his cattle as he knew his children?

Later on, when little men came, at mid-life, to herding on the plains,
they were compelled to burn a mark on their cattle. But we who had bred
the beef steer for three-quarters of a century did no such child's play.
How the crowd at Roy's tavern would have roared at such baby business. I
have seen at this tavern a great mix of a dozen herds, that looked as
like as a potful of peas, separated by an idle loafer sitting on a
fence, calling out, "That one's Woodford's, an' that one's Alkire's an'
that one's Maxwell's, an' the Polled-Angus muley belongs to Flave
Davisson, an' the old-fashioned one is Westfield's. He must have got him
in Roane or Nicholas. An' the Durham's Queen's, an' the big Holstein
belongs to Mr. Ward, an' the red-faced Hereford is out of a Greenbrier
cow an' goes with the Carper's."

By the time I had gotten through the drove we had reached the
crossroads, and I found Ump waiting with the two hundred cattle