I was giving my best services to the new company.  Save for the fact that I had capable foremen on my individual ranches in Texas, my absence was felt in directing the interests of the firm and personally.  Major Hunter had promoted an old foreman to a trusted man, and the firm kept up the volume of business on the trail and ranch, though I was summoned once to Dodge and twice to Ogalalla during the summer of 1883.  Issues had arisen making my presence necessary, but after the last trail herd was sold I returned to my post.  The boom was still on in cattle at the trail markets, and Texas was straining every energy to supply the demand, yet the cry swept down from the North for more cattle.  I was branding twenty thousand calves a year on my two ranches, holding the increase down to that number by sending she stuff up the country on sale, and from half a dozen sources of income I was coining money beyond human need or necessity.  I was then in the physical prime of my life and was master of a profitable business, while vistas of a brilliant future opened before me on every hand.

When the round-up outfits came in for the summer, the beef shipping began.  In the first two contingents of cattle purchased in securing the good will of the original range, we now had five thousand double wintered beeves.  It was my intention to ship out the best of the single wintered ones, and five separate outfits were ordered into the saddle for that purpose.  With the exception of line and fence riders,—­for two hundred and forty miles were ridden daily, rain or shine, summer or winter,—­every man on the ranch took up his abode with the wagons.  Caldwell and Hunnewell, on the Kansas state line were the nearest shipping points, requiring fifteen days’ travel with beeves, and if there was no delay in cars, an outfit could easily gather the cattle and make a round trip in less than a month.  Three or four trainloads, numbering from one thousand and fifty to fourteen hundred head, were cut out at a time and handled by a single outfit.  I covered the country between the ranch and shipping points, riding night and day ahead in ordering cars, and dropping back to the ranch to superintend the cutting out of the next consignment of cattle.  Each outfit made three trips, shipping out fifteen thousand beeves that fall, leaving sixty thousand cattle to winter on the range.

Several times that fall, when shipping beeves from Caldwell, we met up with the firm’s outfits from the Eagle Chief in the Cherokee Outlet.  Naturally the different shipping crews looked over each other’s cattle, and an intense rivalry sprang up between the different foremen and men.  The cattle of the new company outshone those of the old firm, and were outselling them in the markets, while the former’s remudas were in a class by themselves, all of which was salt to open wounds and magnified the jealousy between our own outfits.  The rivalry amused me, and until petty personalities