noon
Cows that carried on their flanks the A T O , he turned and started northward . As he returned , he would gather up these strays and drive them back to their own range . For in those days , before the barbed wire had reached Texas and crisscrossed it with boundary lines , the cowboy was a fence more mobile than the wandering stock . It was past noon when Roberts dropped into a draw where an immense man was lying sprawled under a bush . The recumbent man was a mountain of flesh ; how he ever climbed to a saddle was a miracle ; how a little cow-pony carried him was another . Yet there was no better line-rider in the Panhandle than Jumbo Wilkins . '' ` Lo , Texas , '' the fat man greeted .