Ellison sighed. "They're scattered all the way from here to the Cimarron, and you two couldn't find enough of them to pay back one percent on what that herd of living cattle represented."
"We're not going to confine oureslves to the Block E brand when it comes to bones, mother," Eudora said with her big, boyish grin. "All bones look alike to us."
"Let these poor, good-for-nothing homesteaders have 'em," Mrs. Ellison counseled, with a flash of the old range enmity against farmers. "Bless your innocent hearts, you two couldn't make a hundred dollars between now and Christmas, picking up bones and haulin' them down to Drumwell at five dollars a ton."
"We'll get more than that," Eudora declared. "Tom knows a man in Kansas City who buys them; we're going to sell them direct."
"A hide man," Tom nodded. "I got to know him through the affinity of the craft."
"I guess you mean the smell, Tom," Mrs. Ellison said, smiling in spite of the clouds when she remembered the tan-yard of her youth. "Even if you got twice that much you'd be a long time gettin' rich. It's a good two-days' haul from here to Drumwell, and you can't take more than a jag over these roads. Besides, it will be plain murder for us to let Tom go down to that nest of thieves, with old Wade Harrison's gang layin' for him. I'll not be guilty of it; I'm not going to let him go."
The two young ones knew she had come to the core of her objection with that. Both of them had thought of that menace to their undertaking, but both had minimized it, in the confident way of youth with what seems
