The territory which Captain Ellison had to cover to find the Dinsmore gang was as large as Maine. Over this country the buffalo-hunter had come and gone; the cattleman was coming and intended to stay. Large stretches of it were entirely uninhabited; here and there sod or adobe houses marked where hardy ranchers had located on the creeks; and in a few places small settlements dotted the vast prairies.
There were in those days three towns in the Panhandle. If you draw a line due east from Tascosa, it will pass very close to Mobeetie, a hundred miles away. Clarendon is farther to the south. In the seventies Amarillo was only what Jumbo Wilkins would have called "a whistlin'-post in the desert," a place where team outfits camped because water was handy. The official capital of the Panhandle was Mobeetie, the seat of government of Wheeler County, to which were attached for judicial purposes more than a score of other counties not yet organized or even peopled.
To the towns of the Panhandle were drifting in cowboys, freighters, merchants, gamblers, cattle outfits, and a few rustlers from Colorado, New Mexico, and the more settled parts of Texas. They were the hardier sons of an adventurous race, for each man had to make good his footing by his own strength. At first there had been no law except that which lay in the good-will of men, and the holster by their side. The sheriff of Wheeler County had neither the deputies nor the financial backing to carry justice into the mesquite. Game gunmen served as marshals in the towns, but these had no authority on the plains. Until Captain Ellison and his little company of Rangers moved into the district there had been no way of taking law into the chaparral. The coming of these quiet men in buckskin was notice to the bad-man that murder and robbery were not merely pleasant pastimes.
Yet it would be easy to overstate the lawlessness of the Panhandle. There were bad men. Every frontier of civilization has them. But of all the great cattle country which stretched from Mexico to the Canadian line none had a finer or more orderly citizenry than this. The country was notably free of the bloodshed which drenched such places as Dodge City to the east or Lincoln County, New Mexico, to the west of the Panhandle.
Ellison wanted the Dinsmores, not because he believed he could yet hang any serious crime on them but for the moral effect upon them and the community. Clint Wadley had gone looking for trouble and had been wounded in consequence. No Texas jury would convict on that count. But it was not a conviction the fire-eating little Captain wanted just now. He intended to show that his boys could go out and arrest the Dinsmores or any other lawbreakers, whenever the occasion called for it. It might take them a week or a month or six months, but they would bag their game in the end. The rule of the Texas Rangers was to sleep on a man's trail until they found him.