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horse he left on. We didn’t haggle much. He priced the horse too cheap, so I bought it.
    This fellow took me up to the hotel in a little Ford roadster and went back down to his pens. I saddled my horse and started off. The horse moved out nice and had a good, long, flat running walk. He had a good short back and carried me easy and felt stout under me. I could tell he was what I needed for the trip I had in mind. He was about fifteen hands high, weighed a thousand and fifty pounds, and had a smooth way of carrying himself. He stepped over the ground with a fair overreach and nodded his head a little bit. You could tell he was a good road horse.
    I went by Swartz’s General Mercantile and bought a stake rope, a yellow slicker, and some grub to wrap up in my slicker and tie on the back of my saddle. I headed out south and a little west of Uvalde, following on the east side of the Anacacho Mountains a narrow country road that I thought would get me to the Shield Ranch. The first night out I camped in the foothills of the mountains by a little creek. My horse staked out good—behaved himself and went to grazing. I made a little fire and fried some meat on the end of a stick, then I made my bed and went to sleep.
    It was the fall of the year and a little chilly—good sleeping weather—however, I waked up before daylight. My horse was full and rested, standing asleep on three legs atthe end of his stake rope. He still had plenty of grass within reach. I fixed a little breakfast, got an early start, and headed out over the divide—still going toward the Rio Grande country. This country was awfully dry. I had seen very little livestock, very few cattle and hardly no horses atall. A little after noon on this second day, I rode on the site of a great big wide gate with high gateposts and an arch between them over the top of the gate. On this arch was a wide slab of oakwood with a huge shield burned into it and the name “Broquel,” the word for shield in Spanish, burned beneath the shield.
    I turned in and rode several miles before I came in sight of the headquarters of the Shield Ranch. There were a number of houses and corrals and improvements, and some of the big old trees like an old, old headquarters would have. You could see the house had thick ’dobe walls and was tile-roofed, and the outbuildings around it were of similar construction. It had been a ranch headquarters for many, many years.
    Of course, a man that had lived his life in the West and had been around lots of cow outfits would readily detect which one of those buildings was the cook shack. I rode up to the cook shack, tied my horse to the hitch rack, and about the time I stepped on the ground somebody from inside hollered, “Git down, tie yore horse, and come in”—all of which I did.
    There was a great big old long dining room with a great big long table running down through the middle of it, benches on both sides, and a chair at the end of the table. The cook was one of those old-timey ranch cooks, old and fat and happy about it all. Some cowboys were working in the corrals down below the headquarters. They saw me ride up, and of course they kinda got their work caught up—whatever they were doing—and moseyed up to the cook shack to get a cup of coffee and some conversation and find out who the newcomer was.
    The West was pretty polite in those days. Nobody askedyou too many questions. If you wanted to tell them, they listened—but if you didn’t, they didn’t ask you. Three cowboys came in and got big tin cups of coffee and sat down on a long bench and talked and visited and told about the drouth—it looked like it was going to be a hard winter. I told them how much of the country it covered, and some other things they hadn’t heard. In those days, there was not too much communication, very few radios, and not too many ways of getting news from the outside. They had heard, though, that