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RV 337 (BUDDENBROOKS) Grünlich—oh, goodness! He was all the time saying how clever and resourceful he was, and all the time hiding his villainy. Permaneder is not in the least like that. You might say he is too easy-going and takes life too comfortably—and that is a fault too; because he will never be a millionaire that way, and he really is too much inclined to let things go and muddle along—as they say down there. They are all like that down there, Ida—that is what I mean. In Munich, where he was among his own kind and everybody spoke and looked as he does, I fairly loved him, he seemed so nice and faithful and comfy. And I noticed it was mutual—but part of that, I dare say, was that he takes me for a rich woman, richer probably than I am; because Mother cannot do much more for me, as you know. But I hardly think that will make much difference to him—a great lot of money would not be to his taste.—But—what was I saying, Ida?”

“That is in Munich, Tony. But here—”

“Oh, here, Ida! You know how it was already: up here he was torn right out of his own element and set against everybody here, and they are all ever so much stiffer, and—more dignified and serious. Here I really often blush for him, though it may be unworthy of me. You know—it even happened several times that he said ‘me’ instead of ‘I.’ But they say that down there; even the most cultured people do, and it doesn’t hurt anything—it slips out once in a while and nobody minds. But up here—here sits Mother on one side and Tom on the other, looking at him and lifting their eyebrows, and Uncle Justus gives a start and fairly snorts, the way the Krögers do, and Pfiffi Buddenbrook gives her Mother a look, or Friederike or Henriette, and I feel so mortified I want to run out of the room, and it doesn’t seem as if I could marry him—”

“Oh, childie—it would be Munich that you would live in with him.”

“You are right, Ida. But the engagement!—and if I have to feel the whole time mortified to death before the family

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RV 338 (BUDDENBROOKS) and the Kistenmakers and the Möllendorpfs, because they think he is common—Oh, Grünlich was much more refined, though he was certainly black within, as Herr Stengel would have said.—Oh, Ida, my head! do wet the compress again,”

“But it must be so, in the end,” she went on again, drawing a long breath as the compress went on; “for the main point is and remains that I must get married again, and not stick about here any longer as a divorced woman. Ah, Ida, I think so much about the past these days: about the time when Grünlich first appeared, and the scenes he made me—scandalous, Ida!—and then about Travemünde and the Schwarzkopfs—” She spoke slowly, and her eyes rested for a while dreamily on a darn in Erica’s stocking. “And then the betrothal, and Eimsbüttel, and our house. It was quite elegant, Ida. When I think of my morning-gowns—It would not be like that with Permaneder; one gets more modest as life goes on—And Dr. Klaasen and the baby, and Banker Kesselmeyer—and then the end, it was frightful; you can’t imagine how frightful it was. And when you have had such dreadful experiences in life—But Permaneder would never go in for anything filthy like that. That is the last thing in the world I should expect of him, and we can rely on him too in a business way, for I really think he makes a good deal with Noppe at the Niederpaur brewery. And when I am his wife, you'll see, Ida, I will take care that he has ambition and gets ahead and makes an effort and is a credit to me and all of us. That, at least, he takes upon himself when he marries a Buddenbrook!”

She folded her hands under her head and looked at the ceiling. “Yes, ten years ago and more, I married Grünlich. Ten years! And here I am at the same place again, saying yes to somebody else. You know, Ida, life is very, very serious. Only the difference is that then it was a great affair, and they all pressed me and tormented me, whereas now they are all perfectly quiet and take it for granted that I am go-

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RV 339 (BUDDENBROOKS) ing to say yes. Of course you know, Ida, that this engagement to Alois—I say Alois, because of course it is to be—has nothing very gay or festive about it, and it isn’t really a question of my happiness at all. I am making this second marriage with my eyes open, to make good the mistake of my first one, as a duty which I owe our name. Mother thinks so, and so does Tom.”

“But oh, dear, Tony—if you don’t like him, and if he won’t make you happy—”

“Ida, I know life, and I am not a little goose any more. 1 have the use of my senses. I don’t say that Mother would actually insist on it—when there is a dispute over anything she usually avoids it and says ‘Assez!’ But Tom wants it. I know Tom. He thinks: ‘Anybody! Anybody who isn’t absolutely impossible.’ For this time it is not a question of a brilliant match, but just one that will make good the other one. That is what he thinks. As soon as Permaneder appeared, you may be sure that Tom made all the proper inquiries about his business, and found it was all right—and then, as far as he was concerned, the matter was settled. Tom is a politician—he knows what he wants. Who was it threw Christian out? That is strong language, Ida, but that was really the truth of it. And why? Because he was compromising the firm and the family. And in his eyes I do the same thing—not with words or acts, but by my very existence as a divorced woman. He wants that put an end to, and he is right. I love him none the less for that—nor, I hope, does he me. In all these years, I have always longed to be out in the world again; it is so dull here in this house. God punish me if that is a sin: but I am not much more than thirty, and I still feel young. People differ about that. You had grey hair at thirty, like all your family and that uncle that died at Marienwerder.”

More and more observations of the same kind followed as the night wore on; and every now and again she would say: “It is to be, after all.” But at length she went to sleep, and slept for five hours on end, deeply and peacefully.

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When men went up to Kansas City to market their cows, they rode in what certain stylish conductors called the way-car, cowboys and cattlemen the caboose, or sometimes the calaboose. That is, they rode there to vary riding on top, which they preferred in good weather, and catch a few winks of sleep between proddings-up along the way.

Going home was another thing. Then everybody rode in the smoking-car on one long, blue, much-punched, all-inclusive shipper's pass, with plenty of greasy grub in paper sacks, much bottled cheer, and usually an assortment of prod-poles which they clung to as carefully as if saplings no longer grew, or these seasoned and tried ones had some especial quality which no amount of search through the forests of the earth could replace.

These prod-poles they stood around to tumble down, in the violent agitation of stopping and starting, and crack passengers on the heads, or stowed beneath seats to impede passengers' feet, cluttering things up in a general way to the disgust of trainmen and testy gentlemen who frequented smoking-cars. But trainmen were a wise generation—from experience—in those days, and passengers more tolerant and democratic, perhaps, than now, when prod-poles in day coaches are unknown.

Things went along serenely as a general thing when

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 an outfit was going home from Kansas City, its fancily labelled bottles passing around without stint from lip to lip. There were outbursts of hilarity and a little shooting now and then; once in a while a bunch went wild and had things its own way, but taken in the main these home-going excursions were comfortable, friendly, full of genial appreciation of what had been seen and keen anticipation of telling about it in cow-camps by and by.

Such a good-natured gang was that of the Bar-Heart-Bar, starting home from escorting a thousand-odd grass-fattened cattle to market. The four of them had gone aboard the minute the train was placed, where they had taken possession of the front end of the smoker, turned two seats to face, stowed their prod-poles and squared off for the practically all-day ride to Wellington, where they would change trains for Drumwell on the Cherokee Nation border, fifty miles from home.

The party was one short, either through desertion or mischance, a matter that gave them some concern. Waco Johnson was the delinquent person. He had strayed in his hobble during the night from the Stockyards Hotel, lured away, perhaps, by the familiar sounds of cattle in the pens close under the windows, and had failed to show up. Now they were due to roll out in fifteen minutes, leaving Mr. Johnson facing the problem of paying his own fare back to the starting-point if he had the desire in his gizzard to keep his job with the Bar-Heart-Bar. It was altogether unlikely, they knew, that he would have enough money to meet that contingency as a gentleman should.

"Well, I guess I'll take another look around for him," Sid Coburn said, more vexed than anxious, hoisting him-

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 self up on his long legs, which were singularly straight for a saddle-bred man.

"Don't you git tangled up and not come back with that ticket," Pete Benson admonished him. "We'd be in a one-hell of a fix if you didn't come back."

Wallace Ramsey and Joe Lobdell added their solemn asseveration that they sure would be in a one-hell of a fix if the boss got tangled up in the crowd on Union Avenue and lost his points of direction. None of them considered the little old handbag under the boss' seat, kicked around carelessly, impatiently sometimes, when it got persistently in somebody's way, whiclr contained thirty-five thousand and odd dollars in currency, the net proceeds of the shipment. It was altogether inconsiderable to them; it wasn't their money. They'd have piled off the train at the first stop and walked back to Kansas City if the boss had lost his points in the whirl of humanity and missed the train with that long blue ticket, carrying the old handbag and all with them, red-necked and resentful of the imposition.

"Don't you worry—I'll be back on the dot," Sid assured them.

"I wouldn't resk it for no old booze-skimmin' muskeeter like Waco," Wallace protested. "Let him hoof it, dang him."

No chance of the boss straying off; he scarcely let go the handrail when he gingerly stepped down in his tight new boots with three-inch heels. He stood there so close to the step that one hop would have landed him safely aboard at the first turning of a wheel, combing the confusing stream of people which ran in and out among the

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 waiting trains with sharp eyes, looking for Waco's familiar brand. Waco was not there, stampeding around as he should have been, trying to locate that train. Let him go, said the boss; dang his old melt, let him burn it back, or walk.

Cowboys were not so much a sight in Kansas City then—or now, for that matter—as they were in some parts of this cultured land. Nobody paid any attention to the thin-featured, anxiously peering, long-shanked man in bronze-topped new boots, black silk shirt, scarlet necktie and gray moleskin vest. The brakeman ignored him with haughty carriage, knowing he was going back to the benighted place he came from on a hog-train ticket, as the elite of railroads spoke of cattlemen's passes.

Sid climbed back into the car after a few minutes, returning rather gloomily to his companions, who were talking animatedly, already beginning to relax from the strain of hopping and dodging out of the track of cable cars and carriages. They wondered again, their vexation growing, over Waco's plight, taking it for granted that he was somewhere involved in the bewildering machinery of that roaring town, dropping him presently to go on with the recounting of experiences from which they were still warm, as a man just rolled out of the blankets on a frosty morning. The boss took the pass from his wallet and sat staring at it in gloomy abstraction.

"Well, sir, as I was sayin', fellers, I never was up agin one of them fancy joints," Wallace went on with his narrative which the boss' return had interrupted, "and I stopped there lookin' in that winder like a horse with its

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 head over the fence. I says 'Feller, you've got money to burn; go on in and burn it.'"

"Where was that at?" Sid looked across at Wallace with a sort of patronizing, kindly interest in his adventure.

"The caff up at the Coates House."

"Hell! You didn't break in there, did you?" Sid inquired, a big grin working a surprising transformation in his long, solemn face.

"I'm tellin' you," said Wallace, twisting his head in portentous expression of revelations to come.

Wallace paused there with the true dramatist's valuation of suspense. Joe Lobdell laid a slap that measured his appreciation on his friend's rounded shoulders, and Wallace, who was a light-eyed man with large protruding teeth, looked around his little circle with the warm glow of a man who had much to bestow and was going to pass it out with liberal hand.

"You was lucky they didn't pitch you out on your neck," said the boss.

"Maybe I was," Wallace agreed, "but that bouncer was as nice as a come-on man. He tolled me off to a feed-box in one corner of the krel and sent a he-waiter to see what I was eatin'. Well, I thinks I'm in, and I'll go the limit. I looked over that chuck list a minute and I says to him 'Come totin' it all in, son,' I says, and I lent back and hooked my arm over m' cheer like money wasn't no objection to me."

"The hell you did!" said the boss. "Did he fetch you all of it?"

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 sentment, humor gleaming in his pale eyes. "That feller renigged on me, boss-man; he picked 'em out here and there down the line, thinkin' I didn't have the money to stand it all, I guess. But he started at the top, anyhow. The first thing he fetched me was a horse de over."

"A horse which?" Sid inquired, leaning forward curiously.

"De over." Wallace glanced around in well-simulated manner of surprise. "Mean to tell me none of you fellers ever et a horse de over?"

"I bit a mule's neck one time, though," Joe Lobdell said.

"They start off with 'em in them copper-bottomed caffs," Wallace explained.

"They can keep goin' on with 'em," Pete Benson said, with comfortable superiority.

"What's it made out of?" the boss inquired.

"I'm here to tell you!" Wallace replied fervently. "A horse de over is a plain sardine."

"Sardine?" said everybody, genuine in their surprise that such a familiar article of diet should figure on a fancy bill of fare.

"One sardine," Wallace solemnly averred, "laid out in the middle of a deesh with a olive at his head and a reddish at his tail, and little pieces of pickle all around him. That's a horse de over, men, if anybody asks you."

Wallace politely restrained himself at the climax of his revelation, joining in the big laugh after it was well under way. The boss was so diverted by the explanation of this dish that he took off his hat to give his head air, looking around with the blue pass for five men between his fingers, his big ears red in the heat of his mirth.

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 Across the aisle a somewhat moody-looking young man was smoking a straight-stemmed pipe, his eyes on the ceiling of the grimy car as if immersed in some problem or contemplation that insulated him against all the laughter loose in the world that day. But he seemed to feel Sid's look, which was in effect an appeal to get in on that rare piece of humor and have his laugh. He turned his head, nodded affably, his face still as solemn as Sid Coburn's own at its worst.

"Very good," said he, with intonation strange to their ears; "very-very good."

He enunciated the "very-very" as one word, a queer little stress on the first part, speaking quickly, a roundness and resonance in his tone as alien to their ears as culture in any form. But there was no more mirth in him than in Wallace's sardine.

"Did you eat him?" Pete wanted to know.

"No, I never," Wallace said, studiously reminiscent. "He looked so much like a corpse laid out for the grave I took some of them little pieces of green stuff from around the aidge of the deesh and I covered him up with 'em, and when that he-waiter come back I says 'You can bury that old feller—he's all ready,' I says."

They whooped louder than before at this, even the young man across the aisle breaking his face in a hard-come little grin that looked as if it hurt.

"Here she goes!" Joe Lobdell announced shrilly, his hat-brim doubled back against the window. "He's givin 'im the high-sign—here she goes!"

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 got up, leaned with hand on the arm of the young man's seat and peered out through his window, that being on the station side.

"Lost one of my men," Sid explained.

"Unfortunate," said the young man.

"Unfortunate for him, the derned fool! And here I've got a goin'-home pass callin' for five men and only four to ride on it."

Sid spoke resentfully, as if he faced the liability, through the defalcation of Waco Johnson, of being called to answer for some grave dereliction.

"At least you're one better off than I am," the young man remarked, very quietly, not greatly interested, it appeared.

"How do you mean better off? For men, do you mean?"

Sid straightened from peering out of the window to throw a glance around at his three cow-valets among their prod-poles, bundles and paper bags, as if to make sure he had no more.

"For tickets," the solemn young man replied. "You have one too many; I have none at all."

"You ort 'a' got you one," Sid told him, interested but unmoved. "They sock you for excess fare if you don't buy a ticket."

"It would be very-very difficult to collect," said the solemn young man.

"Broke, and travellin' on your nerve, heh?"

"Broke, and starting out to travel on my nerve. I don't know how far along I'll get with it."

The young man looked up at the tall cowman, his face

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 as grave as before, but the glimmer of a smile in his shrewd gray eyes. He moved over: Sid Coburn, suddenly and keenly interested in the traveller's method, accepted the invitation, noting, as he seated himself, that the adventurer was going without sack, satchel or paper bag.

"I reckon you're only goin' a station or two—I see you're travellin' light," Sid ventured.

"I rather expect a station will be as far as I'll get on this train. Luggage would be such a nuisance, you know, when they come to chuck me off."

"Well, you take it purty easy," Coburn said, looking at him with the crude, direct impertinence of his kind, up and down and all over, taking in the details so thoroughly he would be able to describe his marks a year from that day.

Between twenty-five and thirty, Coburn judged him to be, a man who would stand medium height, and weigh about a hundred and fifty-seven. Looked like an out-doors man, and was dressed in a sort of half-and-half style, like a country banker or a brand-inspector, or one of that kind, ready to hop a horse and take a sashay out on business any time. Good-looking, clean-heeled chap, an indefinable air about him that made a man feel he'd had something in his time, or was going to come into it after a while. Black hair, cut short; complexion fair where he wasn't tanned; good-sized nose, thin in the nostrils and flaring, like a blood-horse. A hard-mouthed man, Coburn judged, and a proud one, from the way he lifted his chin and carried it high, like a headstrong horse under a check-rein.

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 "Conductor'll be along in a minute," Coburn said, having got no answer to his last remark.

"I'm rather expecting him," the imperturbable adventurer replied.

"Where you headin' for?"

"Panhandle."

"That's a long ways to try to make it without a ticket," Sid reflected. "Why don't you take a freight? they're easier to bum."

"Out on the line a freight has its advantages," the young man said, nodding confirmation gravely, "But not when you're starting from a town like this. They arrest a chap here if he swings on to a freight."

"I git your scheme," Sid beamed on him admiringly. "You figger they'll not stop this train to put you off between here and Argentine, and you don't give a cuss if they do chuck you off there."

"It's so much more pleasant than walking it," the self-possessed deadbeat explained, diffidently, so diffidently, indeed, that he seemed almost apologetic.

Coburn sat ruminating this extraordinary traveller's case, the blue pass for five men rolled around his finger. He had the cowman's caution about asking or offering favors, and he naturally was a deliberative person in a business deal as well. Before the conductor made his appearance Sid had reached the conclusion that he didn't stand to lose anything by taking this man on the pass in Waco Johnson's place. A man was a man when no names were mentioned; they couldn't hold him for the fare even if they should discover the deceit.

"I could help you along as far as Wellington if you

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 want to pass as one of my men," Coburn finally proposed. "I've got a pass for five men, and only four of us in the bunch since we lost Waco Johnson."

The young man accepted the offer with dignity, quietly grateful, no effusion of thanks in his mouth. He wasn't any man's greenhorn, whatever his line might be; Coburn was certain of that. He introduced himself as Thomas Simpson, shaking hands solemnly all around when Coburn presented him to the gang, explaining that, as far as the pass was concerned, he was as much one of them as the lost Waco Johnson ever had been.

Coburn sat by his substitute for Johnson and politely inquired into his past activitivesactivities [sic] in a business way, calling him Tom with the fraternal equality of a man who is unaware of any superior among his kind. For one man was as good as another as long as he behaved himself, as they used to say on the range. It developed that Tom's last contact with a money-making job had been as a mine guard in Colorado. Before that time he had skirmished around some, he said, without going into details.

It came out finally that Tom's skirmishing had been among various cow-camps and outfits in Wyoming and Colorado; that he had been over from England about seven years, having come with high ambitions toward learning the cattle business as conducted on the western ranges, with a view of going into it himself if fortune should roll his number out of the box. It hadn't rolled out yet, it seemed, and Tom laughed over it when he made the confession, a short little laugh, somewhat hard and cynical, Coburn thought, saying a good deal more of disap-

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 pointment and hard times than his high pride ever would permit his tongue to utter in words.

How he came to be so entirely strapped at that time, and what had led up to the condition, Simpson did not explain. Coburn let that alone, not out of delicacy or sympathy, but because he knew quite well how far a man ought to go in certain affairs without laying himself open to being told where to get off. Tom Simpson was a man who would not hesitate to put an impertinent fellow in his place; Coburn could see that without any kind of glasses at all.

Coburn had his measure, at any rate, and was satisfied with the result. Young Englishmen of that type were not scarce on the range in those days, when a great deal of British capital was invested in the big cattle companies. Young fellows who had been wild, most of them, sent over to the cattle range where they might blow off their spirits without further compromising the folks at home. It was a long distance between the cattle ranges and England, and what would be naughty, naughty conduct in the standards of the older land was accepted as only the natural expression of lively young manhood in the new.

They got money from home every three months, most of these young chaps, burned a big red streak with it while it lasted, and took their hardships between remittances like the real men they were at foundation. Some of them made good to sensational degree; Coburn knew of some in the Panhandle country of Texas, where he had got his own start as a cowpuncher, who had enough silver dishes on their tables to found a mint. Quiet-spoken men, too, like this Tom Simpson; educated men from old col-

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 leges, wise in the accumulated knowledge of mankind.

So it was thought, at any rate. There never was a place where education was more venerated than in the cow-camps of the west. College men, from England and from home places, were not rare in those times; it was a sort of catch-all for college men, indeed, that wide-open country west of the Arkansas. No matter for their dissipations and utter worthlessness of character—and some of them were about as bad as men ever get to be—they always were more or less hallowed by that glamour of a college education.

"That man's got a college education," was at once the palliation and the absolution for his excesses and follies. His comrades boasted it in pride of reflected consequence and superiority. It seemed to be the general belief among the unlettered that a college education gave a man some kind of subtle advantage over all men less fortunate, which he had only to exercise to elevate himself into riches and power. That he did not employ this talisman to his own profit usually was taken as proof of his humane and generous spirit. His associates were hopelessly trammelled by ignorance: why should he desire to rise above them? So his friends and companions believed, in the face of all evidence that an educated sot is the most depraved and disgusting creature that shames the shape of man.

Tom Simpson rode along with his new companions that day, playing poker with them, winning a few dollars of their money, to which they unreservedly felt that he was welcome, considering his financial state, eating out of their paper sacks, taking a nip with the rest when the

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 bottle went round, to all appearances entirely comfortable and in his proper place. Sid Coburn studied him from this angle and from that, finally making the proposal that, if Tom had nothing definite at the end of the trail in the Panhandle, he go on to Drumwell with them and take a job on the Bar-Heart-Bar in case Waco Johnson did not stray back in due time.

Of course there was not anything certain about it, Coburn said. Waco might ramble in on the next train, in which case Tom would be pretty sure to hook up with somebody else. He could stick around in Drumwell a few days, and Coburn would let him know.

Simpson accepted the proposal calmly, as if it made little difference to him where the railroad ended, Panhandle or on the southern Kansas border, which probably was the case. Coburn liked him better for his undemonstrative way, no glib talk on his tongue, nothing at all that a man could read in his inscrutable poker face. The cowman thought more and more as he studied that mouth clamped on its secrets—rather grimly for a young man's mouth—that here was a lad for a particular job, chance it that a respectable cowman like himself had something of the kind to be done.

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That was the best word one could say for Drumwell: it was railroad leavings. In those days the accretions which settled down after the flood of railroad building had passed and quieted, were not the choicest screenings of the earth. They were graduates of one of the roughest schools of experience that men and women ever attended, but a university whose doors closed long ago, its advantages no longer offering to the unsophisticated of the world.

Drumwell flourished in the days of the Cherokee leases, when Kansas and Texas cattlemen first began to feel keenly the encroachment of agriculture upon the range in their own states, a condition which the pioneers of the industry never believed would curtail the unrestricted exercise of their ancient privileges. But that condition had come to pass, squeezing many an old-timer to face the alternative of either quitting business or paying out hard money for the use of grazing-lands, to them an imposition that seemed as unjust as it was unprecedented.

A branch railroad had been built southward from one of the big lines crossing Kansas east and west, down to the Cherokee Nation line. Like a nodule on the root of a legume, Drumwell formed at the end of this crooked line of hastily built railroad, and rose to a peculiarly notorious eminence in its day.

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 A local fame, to be sure; never so wide-spread as the notoriety of Abilene, Dodge City and Wichita in their formative rawness, nor approaching in any measure the far-spreading fame that came to the town, years and years after the last cowboy had gone his way into the mists, when it elected a woman mayor to rule over it.

The railroad had reached down there after cattle, pausing at the line only because it could not secure a franchise to pass through the Indian lands. It required more of a pull than this particular railroad had, even in those free and easy days, to obtain a grant through the Indian country, so the little branch line sprangled down to the very edge of the forbidden territory and stopped, waiting its day, which came, duly, but not until the fires of adventure had dulled and deadened out of Drumwell's window-panes.

The railroad finished, the construction-gangs went on to other conquests, leaving certain of the camp-followers behind. These people, dropped there like foul settlings out of the turgid, hurrying stream of railroad life, saw prospect of good picking that had begun to pour in from the south even before the loading-pens were completed. It was a big saving in time, and wear and tear, to the cattlemen, that little branch line wandering down to the Nation's edge. There was not much grazing along the trails to the old shipping-points in Kansas; farmers were fencing the country, leaving only dusty streaks.

So it came about that Drumwell's importance descended upon it in a single day, bringing a prosperity to the railroad leavings such as they never had fattened on before. This easy fortune made them arrogant, even though it

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 did not appease the long hunger of their lean years in shifting railroad camps. He was a wise man who left his money behind him when he visited Drumwell, but wise men were few in that time where vice displayed its glittering lure, as they are wanting under the same conditions in this.

At the time of these doings Drumwell was an unlovely hamlet of one street, and that not a long one, which took its beginning from the railroad station, as such towns always have their beginning at the railroad and their ending where unrealized expectations desert them and leave them empty, like an eggshell dropped by a crow when he has sucked it dry. There was always the noise of cattle in it, the smell of cattle, the drift of dust from moving herds.

Drumwell had been fulfilling its primarily useful mission as a loading point for cattle five or six years when the events to be recorded here were shaken out of the handbag of adventure. Its little houses, mainly unpainted, were beginning by this time to appear pitch-drawn, gray; their vertical planking warped by the sun. A few rods back from the railroad the town presented its front, which was assuring to a stranger, the Windsor Hotel on one hand, the Drumwell State Bank on the other.

The hotel was one of the painted exceptions in the town. To be exact, it had been primed for painting, the work stopping there, whether through lack of paint or loss of painter nobody of record ever was curious enough to inquire. This white priming had a streaked appearance where it had been absorbed in places by the softer wood, giving the effect of antiquity so much strived after in

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 these sophisticated times of ours. It was a two-storied structure; large, loose-jointed, altogether unlovely.

On the other hand, the bank was thoroughly, even lavishly, painted, although it needed paint less than any structure in town, being built of sheetiron nailed to studding, flat, squat, with a swaggering square front where the character of the institution was announced in broad letters which could be read half a mile away. The material of which its exterior shell was formed was pressed to resemble solid masonry laid in regular courses. The painter had treated it a granite-gray to further credit this illusion, pencilling in the joints between the hardware stones with white. The pretense was not convincing. It was a bank that would have tempted a burglar with a can-opener. That pleasantry was often directed against its doubly pretentious walls, indeed. For all the present historian knows, the joke may have had its beginning there.

Along the street between its beginning at bank and hotel and its gradual dwindling out to sod huts, tents and open prairie, small business undertakings were established, such as are to be found in any raw little town to-day, except that eating-places outnumbered all the rest. Range men were a hungry tribe; they required flapjacks and oyster stews at all hours of the day and night.

In every town such as Drumwell was at that time, there always was a dominating figure. Here it was not the banker, as one might assume from the prominence of his sign and the meticulous humbug of his tin walls, but Eddie Kane, proprietor of the Windsor Hotel. Kane had come to Drumwell with the other railroad camp-followers.

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 In those days he was a young man in his early thirties, engaged in the innocuous business of running a game known as a baby board. It was an arrangement of blackfaced figures on hinges, familiar even to this day at country fairs, which the player endeavored to knock over with baseballs for a prize, as well as a price. The award was a cigar or cigars, according to the player's success, the price a dime, the number of chances three. And that was the beginning of Eddie Kane's consequence in that place.

The diminutive name which his popularity in the days of his small beginning had won for him, stuck to Kane in the state of his new importance, perhaps because his power was without dignity. He was familiarly addressed by it, spoken of by no other, from the Red River to the Kaw.

Kane was a middle-size, lithe man, suffering from a deformity of some unknown origin—it looked as if from strong acid—that had all but put out his eyes and wried his neck until his head almost rested on his left shoulder. But such sight as there was left to his red-lidded, lashless eyes appeared to be sharpened and concentrated. He could see more devious ways to a dollar than the crookedest cattleman that ever beat the Cherokee chiefs on a lease.

He kept his face cleanly shaved, a thin-featured face, cheeks flaccid against his teeth, outstanding, straining tendons in his stocky strong neck. He was a fair-skinned man, although his hair was black as concentrated pigmentation could make it. He wore it cut short, except for a combing forelock which he parted low over his left eyebrow with carefully turned ends, vain adornment in a

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 countenance as crafty as mischance and inborn disposition ever set upon a man.

All the time the baby board was bringing him in dimes, a jug under his counter was bringing Kane dollars. The laws of the state prohibited the sale of intoxicants, but the law blended out weakly, and fell away to little force, before it reached the Cherokee border. By the time the first herd was driven into the new pens for loading, Kane had a regular bar in the little plank building from which his hotel presently grew.

Kane had married a railroad woman, daughter of a tent-boarding-house keeper, a work-worn gaunt woman who also had prospered on the jug. This boarding-tent daughter was no finer in any particular than her mother, and no better than she should have been, without a doubt. But she was no worse than Kane in her frailest particular, a big-eyed woman, roughly handsome, much loud, raucous laughter in her big Irish mouth. Josie Meehan her name had been. The old hen that brooded her had given up her railroading way and taken root in Drumwell, where she ran a short-order house to catch as many as she might who missed her son-in-law's more thorough mill.

At this historic period of Drumwell's day, the Windsor Hotel was the casino of the town. All of its amusements were centered there, for Eddie Kane was a man who would not countenance competition as long as there was any way of cutting it off, and he was singularly proficient in his ways. There was in his place a long bar of dark polished wood, brass-fitted, mirror-backed, equal to anything to be found between Kansas City and Fort Worth, at which two deft men, aided by Kane himself in a rush,

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 served the nightly throngs. Faro and keno were to be met there, and poker without end.

This bar, with the gambling furniture, occupied one end of the ground floor, the dining-room the other. Between them the entrance hall extended, the front door at one end of it, the staircase at the other. Near this chute of a staircase there was a stubby little counter where the clerk shared duty with Mrs. Kane in receiving and dispatching guests. Capacious folding doors opened from bar to hallway, from hallway to dining-room. At night these were thrown open, tables were removed to the edges of the dining-room floor, and the place became a dance-hall, where a gent might sit down with a lady when he felt leg weary, and sop up as many drinks as his money could pay for and his skin would hold.

This was a spacious room, a row of stocky posts down its center upholding the overhead structure in security against the vibrations set moving by hard-pounding range heels. There were splintered corners on some of them, where the bullets of old rows renewed, and fresh ones springing out of rivalries and jealousies had struck. Human gore is not difficult to remove from the planks of a floor; its dye is not fast and everlasting, in spite of traditions which fix it as unfading. If that had been true, Eddie Kane's floor would have shown its blots from end to end.

Kane held his customers down to a decorum far greater than appeared possible, taking into account the character of these border herdsmen. He was on the watch always, his cocked head over on his shoulder as if he tried to listen to his own heart in the suspicion that it was plotting

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 something against him, his slit-eyes leering through the smoke.

Wildcat never was bred that was quicker on the spring than Eddie Kane; few men came his way who were anything near a match for him in strength. He was his own bouncer, his methods were bare-handed, his execution swift. He went around always in a stiff-breasted white shirt, collarless, without a coat, his vest open, a heavy gold watch-chain swinging in a loop.

A spider of a man, Eddie Kane. He would throw himself into a fracas, grab an aggressor by the neck and waistband of his trousers, rush him to the door and slam him out, contemptuous of his wild-swinging gun. His fame was far-reaching, the respect that it brought him not the least valuable asset in a business where a tough repute was worth more to a man than capital.

The livestock industry was being rapidly pushed off the map in that part of Kansas by the encroachment of the plow, although a few drovers were still holding out in the neighborhood of Drumwell. Westward from that point to the Colorado line things were pretty much as they had been for years. Right around Drumwell homesteaders were filling in rapidly; school and railroad lands, and such of the government domain as remained open between these two divisions, were being bought up, that being a region of deep soil, abundant rain, excellent agricultural possibilities.

Not from these incoming settlers Kane's long bar and boisterous dance-hall drew their support. The big cattle companies and individual drovers holding Cherokee leases, and lying to the west of the little line of railroad that

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 struck southward from the main trunk to end at Drumwell, employed hundreds of riders to care for their herds. There always was a good representation of them in town during the months of cattle activity, either with cattle to load or from long rides after payday with their little wads to squander in one brief riot which exemplified the highest ambition of their barren lives.

These were not the kind of cowboys that are to be met, for example, on the streets of Hollywood to-day, or seen frisking through chivalrous adventures in that romantic shadowland where beauty is ever in distress and virtue continually on the perilous edge of despair. They were slouchy, rancid, unwashed, foul-mouthed, lewd, lascivious, unlettered men. They came to Drumwell as they had come to Abilene, Wichita, McPherson and other Kansas frontier towns in their day, to drink whiskey and dawdle around with parasitical females until they had been parted from their money in the good old way of separating fools from that encumbrance.

There were good men among them, and chivalrous spirits, but taking them as they came they were light chaff of humanity, serving well enough in their time and place. They were no more the intelligence of the cattle business of the old range days than the men who drove the spikes and tamped the ties were the brains of railroad building. Mainly they were men of obscene tongues and shameful lusts, served by despicable panderers among whom Eddie Kane was not notable except in his own little sphere.

On this patronage the little town, which had its beginning in railroad leavings, grew into a lively, flourishing

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 place within a few months of its start. With the coming of a stable population in that vicinity, other business besides that of refreshment took hold in Drumwell until several concerns were thriving, but it is quite safe to say that the combined daily revenues of these establishments did not equal the sum spent over Eddie Kane's bar, and through the solicitation of the "ladies" attached to his house, and in fatuous bets placed on his gambling tables.

Drumwell was a mean place, and proud of its hard distinction. If not everybody in it was jealous of its reputation and tried to live to uphold its peculiar standard, then the exceptions were few. It was a place that timid people shunned unless driven to it through necessity, far away from the seat of the county's authority, a dot on the rim of the map.

The sheriff of the county was under a handicap of many miles, there being scarely one mile between Drumwell and the line of the Cherokee Nation, where federal jurisdiction, only, was recognized. Thieves and murderers always had the bulge on the sheriff; they could get safely down into the Indian country before he could throw a leg over a horse to go after them. It must be admitted that he never was in much of a sweat about making a start.

The official policy with Drumwell, as it had been with other Kansas towns of its kind, was to leave its affairs to the town marshal and itself, to boil out its own wickedness and simmer down to respectability at last. They knew how to handle such towns in Kansas in the good old days.

So it was toward this place that the Bar-Heart-Bar contingent was travelling on the train that day, certain of a good warm welcome when they got to rails' end. And Tom

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 Simpson was sitting with them, smoking his straight-stemmed briar pipe, chin up and sufficient for emergencies, his past behind him, and that nobody's business but his own.

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It was long after dark when the Bar-Heart-Bar party reached Drumwell along with a miscellaneous assortment of cow-country travellers, some bound for the Nation, others to ride westward into the grazing lands of Kansas bordering thereon. That extension of railroad down to the line was such a luxury to the cattle country that everybody was taking advantage of it to go somewhere all the time. Cowboys took trips to Wellington and back for no other purpose than standing on the end of the train and looking off. It had become the vogue to stand on the end.

There was no disposition in the Bar-Heart-Bar party, from the boss downward, to move any farther along on the journey home that night. To them Drumwell was the kind of a place for having a good time in; it suited their limitations of enjoyment far better than Kansas City, which was big and bewildering, and full of wiles for taking a man's money away from him in strange and incompensative ways. A man was pretty certain to be parted from his roll in Drumwell, but he usually got a comfortable skinful first.

So they clumped off the train and into Eddie Kane's place for a snort all around before supper, toward which they had been yearning with ravenous anticipation. While the Bar-Heart-Bar men feasted happily on roast pork, a delicacy seldom enjoyed in their long rounds of beef

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 and bacon, Sid Coburn told Tom Simpson a little, and a very little, about the ranch.

It lay a matter of fifty-odd miles west of Drumwell, on the Medicine Lodge River, which was not much of a river, when all was said, Coburn informed his provisional herdsman, as if to spare him in advance any disappointment the promise of such a romantic name might carry. The Bar-Heart-Bar wasn't a very big outfit, nothing like as big as the Bar-Heart-J of Texas, with which it was sometimes confused. He was hiring about twelve men that season, and would be able to get along with fewer next, as the encroachment of homesteaders was cutting down the range year by year.

Their main job, Coburn said, was to keep the cattle from crossing into the Cherokee Nation, or Cherokee Strip as it was called locally. There were a good many brand-burners down there, put out of open rustling by the cattlemen's association, who did business in strays that way, changing brands or not changing them, as the purchaser might desire, and selling to the Indians. Not much of a business, but the leak was considerable in the course of a year.

No, there was no more cattle rustling, in the old sense, down that way. The association had so perfected its organization that a man on the outside of it stood marked for just about what he was. They had brand-inspectors at all the big markets, and if one man's cattle got mixed with another's and shipped, the inspector asked for a bill of sale covering them. If such a bill of sale was not forthcoming, the odd cattle were told off, collection made for the sale, and the check sent to the rightful owner.

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 No chance for rustlers to get by with the goods any more. Oh, there were a few onery little fellers that butchered stolen cattle and sold the beef to the meat markets in Drumwell and such towns, but they were so low-down and entirely onery they were not worth spending the time on to run down and shoot.

But there were a lot of horsethieves roaming around down in the Strip. They raided over into Kansas, driving away whole herds of horses at a time, which they sold among the cowboys on the Cherokee leases. Horses were not the same as cattle when it came to stealing and selling them down there in the cow-camps of the lessees of the Indian pastures. They kept them down there and used them. A brand made mighty little difference on a horse among the cattlemen and punchers in the Strip.

Well, it was a pretty hard matter to stop that sort of traffic, seeing there were so many brands among horses, the present owners, in more than half the cases, ignorant of their animals' former ownership and caring nothing about it. Take the cowboys of the Bar-Heart-Bar, for example: they'd always risk a bargain horse, passing over the particular of a bill of sale. Coburn said he'd nearly gamble there were no two brands alike among his cowboys' mounts.

On the subject of horses, if Waco Johnson did not come back Simpson would be free to use Waco's until he could buy some of his own. Waco probably was in jail on account of some devilment he'd got into, and he could stay there for all Coburn would turn a hair to get him out. One of his horses was in the livery barn with the others of the outfit. Coburn said he'd leave it there and let it

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 eat its dang head off. If Waco didn't show up in a reasonable time, Simpson could buy it for its board bill. A horse was about as much one man's as another's, anyhow, in those uncertain times.

To all of which Tom Simpson nodded when a nod was coming, and kept a tight tongue. He didn't feel like a man with a job ahead of him, when all was simmered down, for he had more faith in the return of Waco Johnson than the boss. He hoped Waco would come back. There was something in his name that appeared promising.

After supper they went to the big barroom for a game of cards, everybody feeling fine and at peace with the world. The boss was carrying the little handbag around with him, standing it down casually when he stopped to chat with some friend of the range. Tom Simpsom, certainly, had no more notion of what it contained than the brakeman on the train, who had kicked it contemptuously, if not vindictively, every time he passed through the car.

It was a common practice for cattlemen to lug money around with them that way in those days. The custom came down from the old time when cattlemen lived in the isolation of vast uninhabited places, where checks were as useless as they were unknown. Nothing but money went on the range then, and a cattleman always had considerable loose change kicking about, or none at all.

Even when banks came into the cattle country along with the railroads and other business, cowmen for a long time stuck to the old habit of cashing in on their sales and

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 carrying the proceeds home in currency. They usually trusted it to their home banks after getting there, although there were some who never had any use for banks except when they wanted a loan.

Sid Colburn had carried the cash instead of a draft partly because he was old-style, principally because he enjoyed the feeling of opulence attending the possession of much currency. There was a sense of wealth in a gripsack full of bills, that no draft, no matter how well engraved, could impart. In the morning Sid would deposit most of the money in the Drumwell bank, with a large feeling of satisfaction as he stacked the bills in the teller's window, thousand by thousand, with calculative deliberation, each packet bound by the little strip of paper as it had come from the big institution at the stockyards in Kansas City.

There were several men in the barroom when the Bar-Heart-Bar gang strolled in picking pork out of their teeth in genteel and comfortable style; more were arriving from near and far, promising a merry night and a long one, for it was raining, one of those drizzling autumn rains which might hold on for two or three days. One could pretty well judge the distance each new arrival had come by the state of his humidity, which ranged from damp to dripping.

Coburn said, as he viewed the slickers of the newcomers glistening under the lights, that they were in a good place for a night like that. The rest of them concurred to the boss' opinion, unanimously, for once, and paired off for a game of old sledge. Wallace Ramsey declined to disconcert the balance of the table, preferring

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 to circulate around and see who he could bump into, his acquaintance on the range running far.

Wallace was a sort of self-appointed comedian, a harmless, unaggressive man as humorists of that type usually are. He had bought a bright nickeled badge at a pawnshop in Kansas City, with the word DETECTIVE engraved on it, picking it out from a wide selection covering the various executive branches of civil government—constable, police, sheriff—grinning his big horse teeth with inward satisfaction as he pinned it on his shirt and buttoned it out of sight under his vest.

There promised to be more fun in a detective badge than any other. Going on a long and wide experience, Wallace knew that the simple word "detective" would raise more hair in the general run of cow-camps than anything ever put up in bottles.

Not that anybody in the Bar-Heart-Bar outfit was hiding out as far as Wallace knew. He hadn't a thought of probing any man's conscience when he polished up the badge and hid it away under his vest, only of flashing it and playing mysterious until the time for the big laugh came. He had pulled the trick on his comrades coming down on the train, even nonchalantly exposing the badge to the brakeman's eye and leaving that eminent railroad official swinging between wonder and doubt to the parting.

Now Wallace went circulating around, grinning away to himself like a beaver, planning to expose his badge in a sort of accidental, unthinking way when he had a bunch of the boys around him, and get his laugh out of the various expressions of alarm, consternation and curi-

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 osity that would sweep across their old leather faces when that potent word flashed in their eyes. It would be worth more drinks than unlimited credit at Eddie Kane's bar.

Kane was in high feather that night, bustling around clearing the tables out of the dining-room, slapping shoulders, shaking hands, passing jokes and laughing in his thigh-slapping loud raucous way, stretching his big flexible fish mouth to let his merriment out, bending and contorting himself as if it gave him a twisting internal agony. He knew Wallace for a harmless good spender, and one of the best callers on the range. It looked like a big night for Eddie Kane. He had them there, and the weather wouldn't let them get away.

There were a lot of strangers in town that night, Wallace remarked as he went pegging around the big room—from group to group looking for familiar faces and not finding any. It didn't look as if it was going to be a very good night for the badge, after all.

There were four glum felowsfellows [sic] standing around the bar, never circulating very, far away from it, who drew Wallace's attention and speculation from the first, giving him a little uneasiness and clouding the natural gayety of his spirits. What troubled him was that he couldn't seem to place the tall slab-sided man with a nine-inch mustache under his long mean nose that seemed to have melted and run down. He was herding the bunch, whoever he was. They must be from the Nation, although Wallace felt sure he had known that crane-shanked man somewhere. The cloud of that perplexing doubt followed Wallace as he went over to the faro table and stood watching the game.

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 Wallace had recollections of twenty-two dollars won on that game once, on one of his rare excursions into the realm of chance. A man might risk a few bucks on it and not be much poorer. If he never risked anything he never won anything; that was a cinch. He stood teetering in his mind, on the verge of going after his wad and trying his luck, watching a fellow whom he astutely took to be a come-on man raking in a handsome profit on his bets.

Others were drawn into the game, some of them winning, as it always runs, Wallace edging a little nearer, the itch of adventure tingling in his fingers. Almost unconsciously he unbuttoned his vest to come to the money in his shirt pocket, and stood that way, hand on his wad, in a sort of trance of indecision, his shining badge laid bare to the bright light of the overhanging lamp.

In that intense moment Wallace had forgotten all about the badge. He stood there with his left thumb hooked in his belt, right hand on the comfortable little roll in his shirt pocket, nothing at all dramatic about his pose, yet something in it that seemed an intentional display, as a real officer, jealous of his importance, might thrust himself into the notice of indifferent strangers.

Wallace was brought out of his trance by the slab-sided man whose identity had troubled him, whom he had forgotten in the deep concentration of trying to make up his mind whether to bet or keep his money to hole up on next winter. Now the fellow was so close to him he nearly shoved that long-horn mustache in Wallace's eye when he craned his mean old buzzard neck to look at the badge.

"Tin-can detective!" he said, his voice sounding as

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 mean and sullen as he looked. "You couldn't detect a skunk under the house, you dam' snake-feeder!"

"I ain't no detective," Wallace said, trying to speak lightly, although he felt trouble as plainly as a caterpillar down his neck. "I'm just a wearin' it to have some fun with the boys."

"You couldn't 'rest a rabbit!"

"Sure I couldn't," Wallace admitted cheerfully.

"I'll take it off of you and make you chaw it, you dough-faced purp!"

"I ain't out for trouble, pardner," Wallace said, backing away from the aggressive citizen whose dignity he seemed to have offended by inadvertently displaying the badge.

It might have been better for Wallace if he had made a front of it, for with each little pulling in of his horns the fellow's insolence increased. Everything had come to a pause while everybody looked on, this pass between the cowpuncher wearing a detective's badge and the man whose feelings seemed so deeply hurt by the sight of it promising a rare piece of entertainment.

Wallace backed off a little farther, the injured party, as he appeared to hold himself, glaring after him in savage threat. Wallace wished he had stuck to the gang, and not gone projec'in' around that way; he wished he never had bought that dang badge, and he wished he was fourteen miles out on the range that minute instead of there in Eddie Kane's saloon facing that red-eyed old horsethief who looked mean enough to eat baled hay.

"I ain't out for no trouble, pardner," Wallace repeated, trying to make it sound like he'd set his claws in its boot

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 heels if it crowded him and give jit the best he had, but only succeeding in giving the other fellow greater confidence to push his trick.

"Any man wearin' one of them things meets trouble when he meets me," the stranger declared.

Wallace never had pulled a gun on a man in his life, but he had a half-made feeling that the time had come when the inviolability of person and the defense of dignity called for such a move. He looked around to see if the boss or any of the boys was rising to his support, an appealing, questioning, doubtful look in his simple eyes.

Joe Lobdell started up as if to come over and take a hand, but the boss restrained him.

"It's that damn fool badge," Coburn said. "I told him it'd git him in trouble. Let him hoe his own row out of it—maybe it'll learn him some sense."

Wallace was well enough acquainted with the habits of dogs to know that, if a man turned his back and acted as if he intended to run when confronted by a hesitating mean one, he'd have to hit it up pretty lively to save damage to his raiment and his hide, yet he didn't calculate with this man as he would have managed with a dog. While he turned his face toward the boss and the boys that moment, the rangy cuss jumped him. The next thing old Wallace knew he was, hopelessly overwhelmed by the sensitive gentleman's companions, the leader twisting a bony grip in his shirt collar, his other hand busy with the offending badge.

Wallace kicked and scrambled and clawed for his gun, but he was as helpless as a hogtied calf under the branding iron. Over at the card table Tom Simpson jumped

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 up, all set to pile in and take a hand, unarmed as he was. Coburn laid hold of him and told him to keep hands off.

"The damn' fool run into it—let him"

A howl from Wallace in the middle of the struggling bunch broke the boss's words off short. There was a heave away from Wallace, a kick by the mustached man that sent him spinning, a roar of laughter out of those nearest the scene, Eddie Kane dancing and doubling with merriment, slapping his thigh as if a hornet had gone up his leg.

The kicker had faced Wallace toward his friends before applying his foot. The simple cowpuncher almost pitched over the table around which the Bar-Heart-Bar gang stood before he got control of his legs, then he straightened up, one hand to his ear, the other raking for his gun. The gun wasn't there, but the detective badge was pinned to the gristle of Wallace's ear, blood from the puncture running down his neck. A little way in front of the Bar-Heart-Bar gang the four jokers who had carried the little pleasantry to such hilarious finish stood lined up as if inviting trouble. Wallace's gun was lying on the floor.

Tom Simpson jumped for the gun, his legs like springs, his movement so unexpected and quick that even Eddie Kane was caught by surprise. Joe Lobdell and Pete Benson pulled out their weapons to cover their nimble friend's designs, while Sid Coburn turned white around the gills and yelled:

"Put up them guns, I tell you! Put up"

Guns were pulled on the other side, and it looked to the crowd like a pretty good time to hunt the air. There was a surge for the doors, one of which let out directly

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 into the street, at the end of the bar farthest from the table where Coburn and his men stood. Simpson bobbed up with Wallace's gun out of the scramble of feet and legs which had tried to defeat his intention. He returned it to Wallace, then faced round to the tall bony humorist who had pinned the badge on Wallace's ear.

"If you'll put up that gun I'll trim you!" Simpson proposed. He was bristling with indignation over the affront that had been put upon his friend.

Wallace had the badge off, handkerchief to his bleeding ear, but the boss had taken possession of his gun. Wallace came boring in, reckless in his fury, wild-eyed and frothing.

"Let me at him—damn his gun!" he said.

The boss jumped out and grabbed him, cinching him with his long arms, holding him in spite of his earnest and valiant struggles to rush up against the long man's gun.

Tom Simpson stood looking the fellow through and through, plenty of floor space around them for whatever operations his contemptuous challenge might set going.

"You're a rotten damned coward!" said Simpson. "You're a dirty sneak!"

The challenged man raised his long black pistol and wavered the muzzle of it back and forth before Simpson's face, not four inches from his nose.

"Smell that! It'll clabber your blood," he said.

Simpson was about a foot shorter than the fellow, but Sid Coburn saw in the way Tom gathered himself that he was getting ready to climb him like a tree, gun or no gun. Eddie Kane was struck with the same intelligence at

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 that moment. He interfered between the two, pushing Tom back with one arm, the lengthy citizen with the other.

"Can't you take a joke?" said Kane, contemptuously severe, turning his malevolent red-edged eyes on Simpson. "Damn fool! can't you take a joke?"

"No, you bloody little crab, not if that's what you call a joke," Simpson replied.

Kane's anger was up in a flash. He ducked and rushed, grabbing Simpson by his effective, if not entirely original, bouncer hold, rushing him toward the door. But there was where Eddie Kane made one of the greatest miscalculations of his career.

Simpson slipped the hold with a wrench. He sidestepped and crouched, and shot out a fist that clipped Kane at the hinge of the jaw, flooring him as if he had been tapped with a bung-starter, that famous weapon once in such wide favor among bartenders up and down this undoubtedly cultured land.

Kane was a tough man, and a rough and ready man. He was floored flatter than he had been stretched in many a day, but he came out of it with steel-legged spring, white in his fury, and his friends moved back to give him room. Simpson took him on as he came, so nimble on his feet, so bewildering in his movements that Kane rushed from one stiff punch to another, roaring and cursing, every blow baffled, every trick of his railroad strategy vain.

The lookout at the faro game came down from his high seat, the bartenders edged each around his end of the counter, but they kept hands off, knowing Kane too well

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 to interfere as long as he could stand on his pins. That was not long. At about the time of one round Simpson made an end of it. He drove a straight clincher to Kane's windpipe and put him down for good.

The town marshal was coming in through the latticed half-doors at the end of the bar at that moment. He quickened out of the cautious, curious, peering attitude that was his habit when putting his nose into trouble—for he was an indifferently valiant marshal, to say the best—and ran forward, yanking out his gun.

"You the feller that's been 'personatin' a officer around here?" he demanded, coming up short in front of Simpson, gun wavering around like the wits of a waking man, to sort of include the whole Bar-Heart-Bar party.

The marshal was a little bow-legged cowpuncher-looking man, with a shallow chin and milky blue eyes. Simpson looked at him curiously, as he might have regarded some extraordinary insect flying in out of the night.

"It's about time somebody was doing it," he said.

"I can 'personate all the damn officers that's needed in this damn town!" the marshal blustered, feeling his dignity touched by Simpson's cool and contemptuous rating. "You come along with me, pardner; you're arrested."

"Oh, very well," Simpson agreed, carelessly, giving the "oh" a queer little stress with rising inflection. His way of saying the word, the nonchalant ease of his bearing, the quick lifting of his chin, all contributed to that expression of superiority that got through the marshal's hide like a cocklebur under a saddle blanket.

"I'll take you down, and I'll take you down right, 'per-

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 sonatin' a officer in this man's town!" the marshal threatened.

"He never done it, Mr. City Marshal," Wallace interposed. "I'm the feller that done the 'personatin' if they was any 'personatin' 'personated."

Wallace pulled the dectective badge out of his pocket and offered it as evidence of his guilt.

"Seein' you're itchin' to be locked up, come along," the marshal ordered, shifting his heels and his gun to include Wallace in the net of the law.

"Now, look a here, marshal; them boys belong to my outfit, and neither one of them's to"

"Make your speech in court, cowman," the marshal cut Coburn off.

"You'll have to let 'em out on bail, and I'm ready to put up any amount," Coburn insisted.

Kane had recovered his wind, together with the pouring of water over his head by his wife, who had come running in, white-faced, big-eyed and silent, from her place at the desk in the hall, and the pouring down of something stronger by the bartender. Kane was leaning weakly against the bar, where his astonished and dumbfounded men had assisted him, his head lopping sickly, his face gashed and bruised. He brisked up at the mention of bail.

"He slugged me with knucks!" he charged. "Lock him up for murder!"

The marshal waved his two prisoners out ahead of him with his gun, opening a way through the crowd that had come back almost as quickly as it had dispersed. Sid Coburn and his two cowboys backed into a corner where

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 they gravely considered the plight of Wallace and Simpson. They were full of indignation at Kane's charge, which they knew to be nothing but malicious lying in an attempt to save his reputation.

Coburn said he'd hunt up the judge—he was nothing more than a justice of the peace—and try to get them out on bail. He wouldn't put it past that weak-stomached marshal, he declared, to fish up a pair of knucks and swear he took them off Simpson. Joe and Pete were for cracking the calaboose and delivering the prisoners, which would not have been much of a job, as it was only a little board box with bars made of old wagon tires over the window and door.

The boss was against any more kicking up, saying they had started enough trouble for one outfit that night. They were milling it over, and getting nowhere, when Wallace stuck his face cautiously in between the leaves of the swinging doors through which he so lately had disappeared under the disgrace of arrest. A big grunt of relief went up from the chests of the Bar-Heart-Bar at sight of Wallace's homely inquiring face. He spotted them, and beckoned them out.

"Well, he turned you loose, did he?" the boss inquired, peering around in the gloom of the drizzling night for Simpson.

"No, he changed places with us for the time bein'," Wallace chuckled. "Tom slammed him in his own private little jail and locked him up. His keys is on the roof."

"The hell he did!" said the boss. "Where's Tom?"

"Waitin' down at the barn."

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 The boss made a noise similar to a ruminating cow. The Bar-Heart-Bar gang, who had been with him a long time, knew he was swallowing his surprise.

"Time we was hittin' the breeze out of this man's town," he said.

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Coburn learned on arriving at the livery stable that the chuck wagon and three men who had helped over with the cattle had gone back to the ranch in due form, according to orders, taking all extra horses along. The boss said Simpson would have to go on to the ranch with them that night if he expected to go on wearing a hide that would hold water. He could use Waco Johnson's horse.

Trouble would pop in that town, the boss said, as soon as Eddie Kane heard of Simpson's escape. Kane had two or three handy gun artists to supplement the city marshal, who was as mean as a warthog himself when he got going right. They'd turn over every blanket in town looking for Simpson. It was time to saddle and ride.

The boss put his little handbag in a sack, along with several packages which he had brought from Kansas City, wrapped his slicker around it and tied it to the back of his saddle, working fast. He was more concerned about protecting the contents of the sack from the weather than his own back. The liveryman, seeing him about to ride off in the rain, said hold on a minute: he had a slicker back in the barn somewhere that had belonged to a man they hung down on the Salt Fork last spring. If Coburn didn't mind a little thing like that, he was welcome to the coat.

Coburn said he didn't have any delicate feelings in such

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 things, but he was pushed for time and thought they'd better go. It would only take a minute, the liveryman said, going off to rummage around for the coat. Coburn sent Simpson out with the two horses to wait in the dark beside the barn along with the three cowboys, who were already in the saddle, all set to go.

There was a dim light in the broad barn door, coming from a lantern in the office; beyond it black night and the rain, and the three cowboys around the corner of the building waiting for the boss to come.

As Simpson crossed this little dim beam from the office window and hit the cool damp air outside, somebody across the street took a shot at him. The bullet slapped hard against the planks, pretty close to his head. Others rattled after it as Simpson crouched between the horses and ran along the front of the barn toward the corner where the cowboys waited.

A bullet struck the steel horn of the saddle on his right, glancing with a mean whang so close to the animal's ears that it lost its nerve and attempted to bolt. In a moment the other horse was involved in the stampede, giving Simpson all he could do to hold them. He was whirled and twisted until he didn't know horse from horse in the dark, in peril of being trampled as well as shot.

Coburn burst out of a side door, which was a man door and not a horse door, just as his men, burning under the imposition, began to give the shooting crowd back the same hot brand of lead they were delivering. The boss jumped into the tangle of horses and Simpson, yelling unheard, or at least unheeded, orders to his men to stop shooting and go. Simpson hopped what he took to be

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 Waco Johnson's horse and streaked out after the gang, who set off with a whoop, shooting defiance as they rode.

Waco Johnson was a good judge of a horse, Simpson thought, whatever his failings in other directions might be. That certainly was a hummer. Not knowing east from west in the obscuration of night and rain, Simpson gave the animal its head.

It seemed to Simpson that in five jumps and a snort his horse was past the bunch of three cowboys, and he was happy enough to have it split the wind that way, for some of the outraged friends of the city marshal evidently had taken horse in pursuit. One of them appeared to have a keen eye or a sharp scent, for he had singled Simpson out and was pushing him hard, yelling between shots for him to stop.

Stopping was the farthest thing from Tom Simpson's thoughts just then. He made himself as little as he could in the saddle and let the long-necked racer go. It would head for home, he reasoned, not greatly concerned over his separation from the Bar-Heart-Bar men, whose shots and whoops he could no longer hear.

Tight after him that persistent reprobate came, banging away with deadly intention but poor aim. None of his shots came near enough to be heard or, if so, their whine was drowned in the whistling wind of his speed. The horse was following a road, from its even gait, and a pretty good one at that. It was so dark there was no skyline, yet not a shade darker than Simpson would have ordered it if he had been arranging the night for the occasion. There was a little grayness in the clouds now and then; on the earth not a thing but the dungeon black-

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 ness into which the horse bored with the confidence of a well-known way.

The whooping behind Simpson stopped, the shooting popped for a little while thereafter, when that also ceased. Whoever it was that made the spurt after him, Simpson thought, had charged with the bristling courage of a housedog, which a little effort and a dash of rough weather quickly cools.

He pulled up to listen. The world seemed as empty as it was black. There was not a sound. The lights of Drumwell were lost; his late companions seemed to have ridden into the black mouth of that silent mystery and disappeared.

Granted that his horse had taken the right road, it was not likely that the others would follow. They would have jumped off some other way when the gang rode out after them and began to shoot; it would be useless to draw to one side and wait in the hope of their passing. The horse would go home, according to the sagacity of its kind. He gave it the reins again.

It was a good while later, perhaps an hour or more, when Simpson, considerably cooled from the excitement and strain of his dramatic dash and escape, realized that he was drenched. He had been too much centered in getting out of that town to think about putting on a slicker, and if he had thought of it his hands were so full of horses it couldn't have been done.

A slicker would not do him much good now, except to keep the steam in and warm him up a little. He didn't even recall whether he had seen a slicker behind Waco

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 Johnson's saddle when he slung it on the horse. He put his hand back to explore.

There was a roll, and a pretty good chunk of a roll, behind the saddle, done up in a slicker, to be sure. But it was not Waco Johnson's slicker; it was not Waco Johnson's roll. In the tangle of things while that shooting was going on, he had jumped the boss's horse and the boss had taken Waco Johnson's.

Not that it mattered, Simpson thought, since they were all heading for the same place. Only he remembered a package which the boss had handled tenderly all day, and put it into the sack with careful bestowal. It looked like a five-pound box of candy, going home to the missus. Simpson hoped he hadn't made a mess of it, which was about what had happened in that jouncing ride if they chanced to be chocolate creams. That was about what Sid Coburn would buy, at a dollar a pound, judging from the domestic look that lay back in his eyes.

Let it rain; the slicker should stay right where it was. He was neither sugar nor salt, nor chocolate creams; it was a cinch he wouldn't melt. Even though most of them must be squashed, some would come through whole, and as long as they were dry they'd be welcome at the ranch-house on the Medicine Lodge River, where the kids would lick the paper and save every smack of the oozing delicacy.

Simpson did not give the little brown bag which he had seen the boss carrying around much thought. He knew it was in the sack, and he had not a spark of curiosity about what it contained. Certainly if he had been put to it to

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 gness the contents, money would have been the last thing he would have chanced. Nothing would have been farther from his own habits, or from the procedure of the well-regulated society in which those habits were formed, than the carrying of money around in any such loose and hazardous way. He was no more cognizant of the fact that he was adrift in the night with a fortune of thirty-five thousand dollars at his back, than he was that Sid Coburn was riding that hour in the frenzy of his loss, raising a posse comitatus to hasten in pursuit.

Whatever it was the brown bag contained—presents for missus and kids, or only the boss's extra shirt, shaving mug, razor and strop—Tom Simpson had no other thought in his entirely honest head than delivering it dry and safe into the hands to which it belonged. He believed the horse was a sensible creature; he was relying, with faith founded on experience, on its homing sense to carry him safely through that adventure which, to Tom Simpson, was rather a mild one, to be sure, and nothing to worry about at all.

Things with and appertaining to Tom Simpson were pretty much as Sid Coburn had guessed. It did not call for an expert in the national characteristics of men to classify him as he belonged. That he was an Englishman was as plain as apples in a schoolboy's pocket. As Coburn had reflected, the western cattle ranges were very well acquainted with Tom Simpson's type. Many young fellows came over in those times to try it out in the rough, some for the experience upon which they expected to build later, others for the adventure of it, but good sports

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 mainly, whatever their motive, and mainly good, sound men.

There were plenty of wild fellows among them, at least wild in the old home standards of conduct, if not so very boisterous according to the morals of the range. Most of them received money from home, and were known as remittance men on the range, as they were similarly designated elsewhere, and the majority of them blew it in one big spree when it came, taking the thick and thin of a cowpuncher's life between checks without a sigh. If they did not always win to close comradship and understanding with the natives of the range, they invariably achieved a certain standing of respect in the rough ethics of that life.

Simpson rode on through the impenetrable night, surrendering full guidance to the horse, which appeared to be confident of its way. From the footing which was becoming muddy, Simpson knew the horse was following a road bearing traffic enough to keep the grass down. That it would lead him duly to the Bar-Heart-Bar ranch he had no doubt. His one concern was the length of time it would take to get there, as the travelling was heavy and slippery, and wearing on a horse.

The rain was increasing, bearing out of the quarter he was facing, driving on a dreary wind that chilled him to the bone. It would be wise to turn in at the first shelter offering, he decided, keeping a sharp lookout for a light. But there was no light. It seemed as if he had ridden beyond the bounds of civilization when he left town.

At a creekside, where there was a windbreak of cotton-

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 wood trees and undergrowth, which he sensed, rather than saw, for it continued black as vengeance, the cold clouds fairly raking the earth, Simpson dismounted to blow his horse. He got his pipe going without difficulty, and considered a fire to warm his shins, giving it up after groping around among the wet branches and soaked twigs.

It was going to be a long pull—he reckoned it only about midnight then—in the saddle until morning, and he'd have to stick to the saddle to give the horse its way. When a man took to his feet and led his horse, the horse yielded guidance to the hand on the bridle. Sit in the saddle and give him his head, as before. That was all a stranger abroad in an unknown land could do.

Meanwhile, Sid Coburn was stretching leather to overhaul the man who had grabbed his horse and made off with his money. At least he thought he was riding in the most likely direction to either overtake or get ahead of him, close in and trap him when daylight came.

There was but one direction a thief would take with refuge so close at hand: south, into the Indian country, where the chances would be ten to one in his favor of getting clean away. That was the direction Tom Simpson had taken, Sid Coburn tight after him on Waco Johnson's horse, banging away with his cannon, yelping himself raw with impotent commands and curses. When the chase became hopeless, Coburn returned to town to report his loss, gather a band among his friends of the range who happened to be in Drumwell that night, to comb the country in the slim hope of ever feeling the heft of that thirty-five thousand dollars again.

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 The three cowboys, separated from their boss in the get-away, came back to look for him, hearing the shooting, making a cautious exploration, Wallace keeping well back in the dark, close to his horse, fearing somebody would identify him if he rode in with his companions and start everything all over again. Pete and Joe ran into Coburn, who was in a froth of rage and desperation.

To think he had been played for a sucker that way, Coburn belittled himself. It was a put-up job, from the very start, that damn Waco Johnson at the bottom of it. That accounted for Waco's absence; he'd arranged it with his side-partner to get on the train and play broke, work himself in with them and grab the money.

It looked reasonable to the gang. Waco Johnson was a new man, unknown to them. He had been around the Bar-Heart-Bar only a month or two, coming from nobody knew where. It was an easy matter for them to work themselves up to a hot state of bitter denunciation, and cook up a plot that had no more foundation than public denunciations generally have.

Simpson would hit for the Nation, of course, where Waco would join him and split the easiest piece of money that ever fell into crooked hands. On that reasoning, Coburn telegraphed the federal authorities in the Indian country a description of Simpson, and sent Pete Benson to the county seat to inform the sheriff and enlist his help. Then Coburn rode off in a blind pursuit with Wallace and Joe Lobdell, his friends taking other roads, all agreeing to make for a certain point of rendezvous the next day, where they would report on anything seen or heard.

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 Coburn was in a wild state of desperation. The loss of that money meant dishonor and ruination. More than half of it was owing to a Wichita bank, the mortgagor having such faith in his honor as to permit him to ship his cattle and make his own collection, something unusual in range procedure. The general program was for a representative of the mortgagor to accompany the shipment, collect the returns, take his cut and hand the remainder, if any, to the cattleman.

Sid had been gloating over the pleasure and dignity that would be his when he deposited that money in the morning, wrote a check for twenty-one thousand dollars, scratched a brief line and mailed it to the Wichita banker who had trusted him to the limit because he had trusted his father before him in the days when the old man speculated in cattle driven up the Chisholm Trail from Texas. In his gloomy rage Coburn overlooked everything that had gone before the moment of excitement and peril at the livery stable which would tend to disprove his sudden and vindictive opinion of Tom Simpson. He even believed the row in the saloon, and Simpson's arrest and escape from the marshal, all a part of the plot. That wall-eyed little lizard of a marshal was in on it, he easily convinced himself, making a mental reservation of a day of reckoning in that quarter.

All night they rode southward, following the cattle trail most used by cattlemen in that section of the Cherokee leases, stopping at cow-camps to roust out sleepy punchers, who became alert and avid for the news with the first eager inquiry; clamoring at the doors of Indian and negro cabins to demand information of a wild rider who

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 might have stopped to refresh himself or enforce a change of horses.

With every mile of the hard-pressed journey, every passing hour of the long, dragging, blank-dark night, Sid Coburn's hope sank lower. His courage died in him and his heart turned cold, but he held on southward to the appointed place of meeting, not dreaming, certainly, that Tom Simpson's horse had circled back when given the rein, and was heading at the same time in a direction almost exactly opposite that of the supposed pursuit.

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Romance is not here: it is over the river, it lies beyond the hills. No person is conscious of living it in his own life; its iridescence always sparkles on some distant shore. The world across youth's eyes are lifted in the straining, heart-drawing hunger to be away on the always-beginning, never-ending, roaming quest for romance. For romance is not here: it is far away along world-old trails which the feet of men have worn in their search after it, a treasure that no man is conscious of when he holds it in his hand.

Eudora Ellison, for example, could not understand why people came to that part of Kansas seeking the romance of adventure, the romance of fortune—which amounts to the same thing, fortune being the ultimate in any case—when she knew neither was to be encountered there. If they found adventure, it was the cutting and shooting kind, the sordid, brawling kind, to be encountered at Drumwell; or fortune, it could be only the commonplace, colorless kind that rose from cattle. A man must follow such a barbaric life in the open, facing all winds and weather, to come to prosperity in the livestock business that he had all the faculty of enjoying it blown out, and frozen out, and washed out of him by the rain, long before it came.

No, that was not the place for romance, give it the best

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 color loyalty might paint. It was only a land of false promises, although it seemed fair as the heart could desire that bright October morning, its blue distances renewed by last night's rain, giving them a fresh allurement, a sad, on-drawing beauty of their own. No romance there, in spite of golden-rod at the roadside, and purple gentian and blue asters growing tall; or billowing sodland yet untouched by the plow stretching away until the eye faltered in its gray-green immensity.

It was all a deceitful lure, this girl thought bitterly, to draw men on to greater hazards and break them unmercifully as in the past. There was a lonely emptiness in the green grazing lands as the girl looked over them which made her heart drag with the hopeless lagging of defeat. Where the Ellison herds once had fed the pastures lay empty, the thousands of acres, once her father's baronial pride, only a tax burden now. For all the beauty of that land, once their hope of affluence and consequence, it was nothing but an impoverishing weight, ten sections of it in unbroken continuity, but only a small patch in the leagues-bounded range over which their sovereignty once fell.

If only she had been left in ignorance of any other life, she reflected, more sad than resentful, she might have taken the heartbreak of it with better grace. If she never had been sent away to graze in other pastures, and return almost an alien, in sympathy at least, the adjustment to this downfall would not have been so hard.

Poverty and ignorance consorted best together. It was a well-intended, but mistaken policy for people like her parents to educate their daughters on the hazards of the

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 cattle business. Better to keep them at home, marry them to some range cavalier and harden them early in the disappointments which almost certainly would overwhelm them in the end.

So Eudora Ellison thought that bright October morning as she flung bones out of her wagon where it stood by a great heap of bones in the spacious barnyard beside the house. She was dressed in blue overalls and cowboy boots, neither fitting her with any particular grace; a gray woolen shirt not cut for any maidenly form, the extra length of its sleeves taken up in several turns from the wrists, and a broad-brimmed brown hat that had seen service on the range for many a year. She had pinned up the lopping brim of this headgear on one side, which gave both hat and wearer a kind of battered, brave jauntiness. Her hair was short, its unconfined curls brushing her cheek when she stooped.

Gathering a pitiful profit out of the wreckage of their past consequence, as many another was doing on the Kansas range that year, Eudora had driven in from her scavaging of bones too late last night to unload. It always made her sad to handle the bones of her old friends who had perished in the great winter kill of three years past. But sentiment could not be permitted to stand in the way of common sense, especially when much-needed money was involved. The bone market was active; more trainloads of bones had gone out of that range the past summer than live cattle. They were grinding them and using them to fertilize their fields in the east, she had heard, the market price at Drumwell being a little more

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 for a ton than one hide of the lost thousands would have brought.

Eudora had not been at home the winter of the disastrous kill on the Kansas range, but she had heard the story so often, she knew the savage harshness of those winter storms so well, the picture of the great tragedy was as plain in her vision as if she had witnessed it.

For weeks the range had been buried under snow. Cattle had been held in such shelter as ravines and creeks offered in that peculiarly unsheltered country until the urge of starvation drove them to break restraint and drift before the bitter wind. Slowly they had marched in their misery, devouring every shrub that protruded above the drifts, lean and staggering, shaggy with icicles, the hollows of their gaunt bodies filled with snow.

Southward the great drift of starving cattle had moved, herd merged with herd, out of all human bounds; windlashed, snow-harried, dim, gaunt figures in the greatest tragedy that ever had devastated the Kansas range. They lodged against railroad fences and died, heaped like tumbleweed that scurries before the autumn wind; staggered against wire fences of homesteads and died; plodded grimly, despairingly, silently, into villages, where they stood in the shelter of houses and died, their carcases so attenuated, so fleshless and dry, that even the wolves refused the banquet which the elements spread abroad with such cruel prodigality.

Matt Ellison had lost above forty-five hundred head. By heroic effort he had hauled hay to a few hundred head which his cowboys held in the valley of the little river

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