If the gamblers and the desperadoes of the cow towns such as Newton, Ellsworth, Abilene, Dodge, furnished a man for breakfast day after day, it mattered little, for plenty of men, remained, as good or better.

The life was large and careless, and bloodshed was but an incident.
During the early and unregulated days of the cattle industry, the frontier insisted on its own creed, its own standards.

But all the time, coming out from the East, were scores and hundreds of men of exacter notions of trade and business.

The enormous waste of the cattle range could not long endure.

The toll taken by the thievery of the men who came to be called range-rustlers made an element of loss which could not long be sustained by thinking men.