- Gil Favor: Takin' a herd north, you have to trail across nearly a thousand miles of the wrinkled skin of earth. Over terrain as strange and different as paradise above from the hot place below. Mostly its too rough or too steep, too wet or dry, too hot or cold, too windy, too lonely. But you take what comes and find a way to move the beeves on through. At least you try. My name's Gil Favor, trail boss.
- Pete Nolan: You sick?
- Gil Favor: What do you expect me to be doing? Singing and telling snappy jokes in a place like this?
- Pete Nolan: No, but I don't expect you to act like a hammer headed cow with a case of colic either.
- Gil Favor: If you just did your job.
- Pete Nolan: We're all doing our best. It's your orders that brought us this way. So don't blame somebody else if it's too tough for you.
- Rowdy Yates: Wait a minute, Cord. Mr Favor didn't even like you. In fact, you came in here and insulted him. And now you're gonna to take the herd over? You're crazy, Mister.
- John Cord: You think fighting's gonna prove anything, even if you lick me?
- John Cord: I hear it.
- Jose Becerra: I told you we shouldn't have risked the fire.
- John Cord: I told you I'm not hiding from anybody. Let them come.
- Jose Becerra: They have no honour. They shoot you in the back.
- John Cord: Not with you facing me, Joe. Besides there's only one and he's making too much noise. I've got a hunch who it is.
- Rowdy Yates: Let's wake 'em up.
- John Cord: No. I don't to be pushed over in the badlands. Those two year olds started it, all the chuck wagon followers, the rest will follow in afterwards.
- Rowdy Yates: That way they're all gonna be spread out.
- John Cord: Have to be. In single file. I don't want them all bunched up in this stuff.
- John Cord: Texas fever? Pocs, cholera.
- Jose Becerra: Don't know. It's strange.
- John Cord: What is it, Mr Favor?
- Gil Favor: Don't worry about it. Nothing catching.
- John Cord: What's wrong. Tell us, man.
- Gil Favor: I took a hit in the war, skull fracture. They warned me it might bother me someday. Could mean brain fever, blindness, maybe worse. Anyway, a man can't push a trail herd with half a mind.
- John Cord: How do you know what this is?
- Gil Favor: It's like they told me. Bad headaches, everything blurry, hard to think.
- John Cord: [to Rowdy] Now you better ride up ahead with Nolan and see the trail we have to take. You'll be better to handle it.
- Pete Nolan: It ain't Cord I'm worried about... Tomorrow we're going down to the river with some of the roughest trail we've ever been on. That ain't all. When we get there, it's Dragoon Crossing.
- Gil Favor: I'm gonna quit it and go back East one of these days, I swear.
- John Cord: Let me know when you do. I'd like to hire your crew, every man of them.
- Gil Favor: You're showing better sense than I thought you'd have.
- John Cord: They're good. I don't know why they stay with you.
- Gil Favor: Matter of fact, I don't either.
- Wishbone: Giving Cord his due don't cost Mr Favor nothing. No good saying he don't know his business.