During this visit a new avenue in life opened before me, and through the influence of my eldest brother I secured a situation with a drover and followed the cattle trail until the occupation became a lost one.  My last visit to Las Palomas was during the winter of 1894-95.  It lacked but a few months of twenty years since my advent in the Nueces valley.  After the death of Oxenford by small-pox, I had been a frequent visitor at the ranch, business of one nature and another calling me there.  But in this last visit, the wonderful changes which two decades had wrought in the country visibly impressed me, and I detected a note of decay in the old ranch.  A railroad had been built, passing within ten miles of the western boundary line of the Ganso grant.  The Las Palomas range had been fenced, several large tracts of land being added after my severing active connections with the ranch.  Even the cattle, in spite of all the efforts made for their improvement, were not so good as in the old days of the open range, or before there was a strand of wire between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers.  But the alterations in the country were nothing compared to the changes in my old master and mistress.  Uncle Lance was nearing his eighty-second birthday, physically feeble, but mentally as active as the first morning of our long acquaintance.  Miss Jean, over twenty years the junior of the ranchero, had mellowed into a ripeness consistent with her days, and in all my aimless wanderings I never saw a brother and sister of their ages more devoted to, or dependent on each other.

On the occasion of this past visit, I was in the employ of a live-stock commission firm.  A member of our house expected to attend the cattle convention at Forth Worth in the near future, and I had been sent into the range sections to note the conditions of stock and solicit for my employers.  The spring before, our firm had placed sixty thousand cattle for customers.  Demand continued, and the house had inquiry sufficient to justify them in sending me out to secure, of all ages, not less than a hundred thousand steer cattle.  And thus once more I found myself a guest of Las Palomos.

“Don’t talk cattle to me,” said Uncle Lance, when I mentioned my business; “go to June—­he’ll give you the ages and numbers.  And whatever you do, Tom, don’t oversell us, for wire fences have cut us off, until it seems like old friends don’t want to neighbor any more.  In the days of the open range, I used to sell every hoof I had a chance to, but since then things have changed.  Why, only last year a jury indicted a young man below here on the river for mavericking a yearling, and sent him to Huntsville for five years.  That’s a fair sample of these modern days.  There isn’t a cowman in Texas to-day who amounts to a pinch of snuff, but got his start the same way, but if a poor fellow looks out of the corner of his eye now at a critter, they imagine he wants to steal it.  Oh, I know them; and the bigger rustlers they were themselves on the open range, the bitterer their persecution of the man who follows their example.”