kings who paid no tribute, and guarded by men who never knew a
master. Whither these were bound, what had conjured them forth,
whence they came, were questions in the minds of the majority of
the population of the North and East to whom the phenomenon
appeared as the product of a day. The answer to these questions
lay deep in the laws of civilization, and extended far back into
that civilization's history. The Long Trail was finished in a
day. It was begun more than a century before that day, and came
forward along the very appointed ways of time.... Thus, far
down in the vague Southwest, at some distant time, in some
distant portion of old, mysterious Mexico, there fell into line
the hoof prints which made the first faint beginnings of the Long
Trail, merely the path of a half nomadic movement along the line
of the least resistance.

The Long Trail began to deepen and extend. It received then, as
it did later, a baptism of human blood such as no other pathway
of the continent has known. The nomadic and the warlike days
passed, and there ensued a more quiet and pastoral time. It was
the beginning of a feudalism of the range, a barony rude enough,
but a glorious one, albeit it began, like all feudalism, in
large-handed theft and generous murdering. The flocks of these
strong men, carelessly interlapping, increased and multiplied
amazingly. They were hardly looked upon as wealth. The people
could not eat a tithe of the beef; they could not use a hundredth
of the leather. Over hundreds and hundreds of miles of ownerless
grass lands, by the rapid waters of the mountains, by the slow
streams of the plains or the long and dark lagoons of the low
coast country the herds of tens grew into droves of hundreds and
thousands and hundreds of thousands. This was really the dawning