Animals: Cold Fire

The trail’s a lane, the trail’s a lane.
Dead is the branding fire.
The prairies wild are tame and mild,
All close corralled with wire.
—Badger Clark

From Texas last week went news of another milestone passed by the dying Old West. No more will roundups end with the branding fire, the pen filled with frenzied bawling and the smell of burning hair and flesh. By a process introduced by Amarillo’s Dr. O. M. Franklin the branding iron is dipped in a chemical, the calf stamped as though it were a cold-storage egg. In a few days the chemical painlessly eats away hair, turns red flesh to white, leaves a clean-cut Bar X or Lazy K.