With the conclusion of the holiday festivities and on the return of the absentees, a feature, new to me in cattle life, presented itself—­hide hunting.  Freighters who brought merchandise from the coast towns to the merchants of the interior were offering very liberal terms for return cargoes.  About the only local product was flint hides, and of these there were very few, but the merchant at Shepherd’s Ferry offered so generous inducements that Uncle Lance investigated the matter; the result was his determination to rid his range of the old, logy, worthless bulls.  Heretofore they had been allowed to die of old age, but ten cents a pound for flint hides was an encouragement to remove these cumberers of the range, and turn them to some profit.  So we were ordered to kill every bull on the ranch over seven years old.

In our round-up for branding, we had driven to the home range all outside cattle indiscriminately.  They were still ranging near, so that at the commencement of this work nearly all the bulls in our brand were watering from the Nueces.  These old residenter bulls never ranged over a mile away from water, and during the middle of the day they could be found along the river bank.  Many of them were ten to twelve years old, and were as useless on the range as drones in autumn to a colony of honey-bees.  Las Palomas boasted quite an arsenal of firearms, of every make and pattern, from a musket to a repeater.  The outfit was divided into two squads, one going down nearly to Shepherd’s, and the other beginning operations considerably above the Ganso.  June Deweese took the down-river end, while Uncle Lance took some ten of us with one wagon on the up-river trip.  To me this had all the appearance of a picnic.  But the work proved to be anything but a picnic.  To make the kill was most difficult.  Not willing to leave the carcasses near the river, we usually sought the bulls coming in to water; but an ordinary charge of powder and lead, even when well directed at the forehead, rarely killed and tended rather to aggravate the creature.  Besides, as we were compelled in nearly every instance to shoot from horseback, it was almost impossible to deliver an effective shot from in front.  After one or more unsuccessful shots, the bull usually started for the nearest thicket, or the river; then our ropes came into use.  The work was very slow; for though we operated in pairs, the first week we did not average a hide a day to the man; after killing, there was the animal to skin, the hide to be dragged from a saddle pommel into a hide yard and pegged out to dry.

Until we had accumulated a load of hides, Tiburcio Leal, our teamster, fell to me as partner.  We had with us an abundance of our best horses, and those who were reliable with the rope had first choice of the remuda.  Tiburcio was well mounted, but, on account of his years, was timid about using a rope; and well he might be, for frequently we found ourselves in a humorous predicament, and sometimes in one so grave that hilarity was not even a remote possibility.