 Chapter 1 Down to the Badlands, the Little Missouri comes in long windings, white from the distance as a frozen river between the ash-gray hills. At its margin there are willows on the small poorlands, which flood in June when the mountain waters are released. Cottonwoods grow, leaning toward the southwest, like captives, draining their bonds, yearning in their way for the sun and winds of kinder latitudes. Rain comes to that land but seldom in the summer days. In winter the wind sweeps the snow into rocky carolins, buttes with tops levelled by the drift of the old, earth-making days, break the weary repetition of hill beyond hill. But to people who dwell in the land a long time, and go about the business of getting a living out of what it has to offer, its wonders are no longer notable, its hardships are no longer peculiar. So it was with the people who lived in the Badlands at the time that we came among them on the vehicle of this tale. To them it was only an ordinary country of toil and disappointment, or of opportunity and profit according to their station and success. To Jeremiah Lambert it seemed a land of hopelessness, the last boundary of utter defeat, as he labored over the uneven road at the end of a blistering summer day. Trundling his bicycle at his side, there was a suitcase strapped to the handlebar of the bicycle, and in that receptacle were the wares which this guileless peddler had come into that land to sell. He had set out from Omaha full of enthusiasm and youthful vigor, incited to the utmost degree of vending fervor by the representations of the general agent for the little instrument which had been the stepping stone to greater things for many an ambitious young man. According to the agent, Lambert reflected as he pushed his punctured lop-wheel distorted and dejected bicycle along. There had been none of the ambitious business climbers at hand to add to his testimony to the general agent's word. Anyway, he had taken the agency and the agent had taken his essential twenty-two dollars and turned over him one hundred of those notable ladders to future greatness and affluence. Lambert had them there in his imitation leather suitcase from which the rain had taken the last deceptive gloss, minus seven, which he had sold in the course of fifteen days. In those fifteen days Lambert had traveled five hundred miles by the power of his own sturdy legs by the grace of his bicycle which had held up until this day without protest over the long sandy rocky dismal roads, and he had lived down less than a gopher day taken by day. Housekeepers were not pining for the combination paid-otato peeler, apocore, can opener, tack-puller known as the all-in-one in any reasonable proportion. It did not go. Indisputably it was a good thing, well-built, and finished like two dollars' worth of cutlery. The selling price retail was one dollar, and it looked to an unsophisticated young graduate of an agricultural college to be a better opening toward independence and the foundation of a farm than a job in the hay fields. A man must make his start somewhere, and the further away from competition the better his chance. This country, to which the general agent had sent him, was becoming more and more sparsely settled. The chances were stretching out against him, with every mile the further into that country he could go the smaller would become the need for that marvelous labor-saving invention. Lambert had passed the last house before noon when his sixty-five pound bicycle had suffered a punctured tire, and there had bargain with a scotch woman at the greasy kitchen door with the smell of curing sheepskins in it for his dinner. It took a good while to convince the woman that the all-in-one was worth it, but she yielded out of pity for his hungry state. From that house he estimated that he had made fifteen miles before the tire gave out. Since then he had added ten or twelve more to the score. Nothing looked like a house was in sight, and it was coming on dusk. He labored on, bent in spirits, sore afoot, from the rise of a hill when it had fallen so dark that he was in doubt of the road he heard a voice singing, and this was the manner of the song. Oh, I bet my money on a bobtail-horse, and a hoodah, and a hoodah, bet my money on a bobtail-horse, and a hoodah bet on the bay. The singer was a man, his voice an aggravated tenor, with a shake to it like an accordion, and he sang that stanza over and over as Lambert leaned on his bicycle and listened. Lambert went down the hill, presently the shape of trees began to form out of the valley. Behind that barrier the man was doing his singing, his voice now rising clear, now falling to distance as if he passed to and from it, in and out of a door, or behind some object which broke the flow of the sound, with a coffee presently, and the noise of the man breaking dry sticks as with foot, jarring his voice to a deeper tremolo. Now the light, with the legs of the man in it, showing a cow camp, the chuck wagon in the foreground, the hope of hospitality big in its magnified proportions. Beyond the fire where the singing cook worked, men were unsettling the horses and turning them into a corral. Lambert troubled his bicycle into the fire light, hailing the cook with a cheerful word. The cook had a tin plate in his hands, which he was wiping on a flower sack. At sight of this singular combination of man and wheels, he leaned forward in astonishment, his song bitten off between two words, the tin plate before his chest, the drying operation suspended. Amazement was on him, if not fright. Lambert put his hands into his hip pocket and drew forth a shining all-in-one, which he always had ready there to produce as he approached the door. He stood there with it in his hand, the fire light over him, smiling in his most ingratiating fashion. That had been one of the strong texts of the general agent. "'Always meet them with a smile,' he said, and leave them with a smile no matter whether they deserved it or not. It proved a man's unfaltering confidence in himself, the article which he presented to the world. Lambert was beginning to doubt even this paragraph of his general instructions. He had been smiling until he believed his eye teeth were wearing thin from exposure, but it seemed the one thing that had a grain in it among all the buncoman bluff. And he stood there smiling at the camp cook, who seemed to be afraid of him. The tin plate held before his gizzard like a shield. There was nothing about Lambert's appearance to scare anybody, and least of all a bold-legged man beside a fire in the open air of the Badlands, where things are not just as they are in any other part of the world at all. His manner was rather boyish and diffident, and wholly apologetic, and the all-in-one glistened in his hand like a razor, or revolver, or anything terrible and destructive that a startled camp cook might make it out to be. A rather long-legged young man in canvas-paties, buoyant in irrepressible light in his face, which the fatigues and disappointments of the long road had not dimmed, a light-haired man, with his hat pushed back from his forehead and a speckled shirt on him, and trousers rather tight. That was what the camp cook saw. Everything exactly as he had turned and posed at Lambert's first word. Lambert drew a step nearer, and began negotiations for supper on the basis of an even exchange. "'Oh, engine are you,' said the cook, letting out a breath of relief. "'No, peddler.' "'I don't know how to tell him apart. Well, put it away, son. Put it away, whatever it is. No hungry man don't have to dig up his money to eat in this camp. This was the kindest reception that Lambert had received since taking to the road to found his fortunes on the all-in-one. He was quick with his expression of appreciation which the cook ignored while he went about the business of lighting two lanterns which he hung on the wagon end. Men came stringing into the light from the noise of unsettling at the corral, with loud and jokin' greetings to the cook and respectful even distant or reserved evenings for the stranger. All of them but the cook wore cartridge belts and revolvers, which they unstrapped and hung about the wagon as they arrived. All of them, that is, but one black-haired tall young man, he kept his weapon on, and sat down to eat with it close under his hand. Nine or ten of them sat in at the meal with a considerable clashing of a cutlery on ten plates and cups. It was evident to Lambert that his present exercised a restraint over the customary exchange of banter. In spite of the liberality of the cook and the solicitation on part of his numerous hosts to eat hearty, Lambert could not help but feeling that he was a way off on the edge and that his arrival had put a brain on the spirits of these men. Mainly they were young men like himself. Two or three of them only betrayed by gray and beard and hair, brown, sinewy, lean, jawed men, no dissipation showing in their eyes. Lambert felt himself drawn to them by a sense of kinship. He never had been in a cow-camp before in his life, but there was something in the air of it in the dignified ignoring of the evident hardships of such a life that told him he was among his kind. The cook was a different type of man from the others, and seemed to have been pitched into the game like the last pawn of a desperate player. He was a short man, thick in body, heavy in the shoulders, so bull-legged that he weaved from side to side like a sailor as he went swinging about his work. It seemed indeed that he must have taken into horse very early in life, while his legs were yet plastic, for they had set to the curve of the animal's barrel like the bark on a tree. His black hair was cut short all except the forelock, like a horse, leaving his big ears naked and unframed. These turned away from his head as if they had been frosted and wilted. And if ears ever stood as an index to generosity in this world, the camp-cooks at once pronounced him as the most liberal man to be met between the mountains and the sea. His features were small, his mustache and eyebrows large, his nose sharp and thin, eyes blue, and as bright and merry as a June day. He wore wool shirt, new and clean, with a bright scarlet necktie as big as a hand of tobacco, and a green velvet vest, a galloping horse on his heavy gold watch chain, and great loose baggy corduroy trousers. Like a pirate of the Spanish Maine, these were folded into expensive, high-heeled quilted top boots, and in spite of his trade there was not a spot of grease or flower on him anywhere to be seen. Lambert noted the humorous glances which passed from eye to eye in the sly winks that went around the circle of cross-legged men with tin plates between their knees, as they looked now and then at his bicycle, leaning close by against a tree. But the exactations of hospitality appeared to keep down both curiosity and comment during the meal. Nobody asked him where he came from, what his business was, or whether he was bound, until the last plate was pitched into the box, the last cup drained of its black scalding coffee. It was one of the elders who took it up then, after he had his pipe going and Lambert had rolled a cigarette from the profeured pouch. "'What kind of horse is that, your riding son?' he inquired. "'Have a look at it,' Lambert invited, knowing that the machine was new to most, if not all of them. He led the way to the bicycle, they unlimbering from their squatting beside the wagon and following. He took the case containing his unprofitful wares from the hand of ours, and turned the bicycle over to them, offering no explanation on its peculiarities or parts, speaking only when they asked him, in horse parlance, with humor that broadened as they put off the reserve. On invitation to show its gate, he mounted it, after explaining that it had stepped on a nail and traveled lamely. He circled the fire and came back to them, offering it to anybody who might want to try his skill. Hard as they were to shake out of the saddle, not a man of them, old or young, could mount the rubber-shod-steed of the city streets. All of them gave it up after a tumultuous hour of hilarity, but the bull leg had cooked, whom they called tatter-leg. He said he never had laid much claim to being a horseman, but if he couldn't ride a long-horned Texas steer that went on wheels, he'd resign his job. He took out into the open, away from the immediate danger of a collision with a tree, and squared himself to break it in. He got it going at least, cheered by loud whoops of admiration and encouragement, and rode it straight into the fire. He scattered sticks and coals and bore a wobbling curse ahead, his friends after him, shouting and waving hats, somewhere in the dark beyond the lanterns he ran into a tree. But he came back pushing machine as no skinned, sweating and triumphant, offering to pay for any damage he had done. Lambert assured him there was no damage. They sat down to smoke again, all of them feeling better, the barrier against the stranger quite down, everything comfortable and serene. Lambert told them in reply to kindly polite questioning, from the elder of the bunch, a man designated by the name of Sewish, how he had lately graduated from the Kansas Agricultural College at Manhattan, and how he had taken the road with a grip full of hardware to get enough ballast in his jeans to keep the winter wind from blowing him away. Yes, I thought that was a college hat you had on, said Sewish. Lambert acknowledged its weakness. And that shirt looked to me from the first snort I got at it like a college shirt. I used to be where they was at one time. Lambert explained that Aggie wasn't the same as a regular college fellow, such as they turned loose from the big factories in the east, where they thickened their tongues to a broad A and called it an education. Nothing like that at all. He went into the details of the great farms manned by the students, the bone-making, as well as the brain-making work of such an institution as the one whose shadows he had slightly left. I had to find an any fault with them farmer colleges, Sewish said. I worked for a man in Montenay that said his boy off to one of them, and that fellow came back and got to be state veterinary. I ain't got none again at college hat as far as that goes, either. But I know him when I see him. I can spot him every time. Well, you let us see them do it all. Lambert produced one of the little implements, explained its points, and passed it from hand to hand with comments which would have been worth gold to the general agent. It's a toothpick and a tater-peeler put together, said Sewish. When it came back to his hand, the young fellow with the black sleek hair who kept his gun on reached for it and bent over it in the light, examining it with interest. You can trim your toenails with it, and half-soll your boots, he said. You can shave with it, saw wood, pull teeth, and brand mavericks. You can open a bottle or a bank with it, and you can open the hired girl's eyes with it in the morning. It's good for the old and young, for the crippled and insane. It'll heat your house and hold your garden, and put the children to bed at night, and it's made and sold and distributed by Mr.—Mr.—by the Duke. Here he bent over it a little closer, turning it in the light to see what was stamped in the metal beneath the words, the Duke. That being the name, denoting excellence which the manufacturer had given the tool. By the Duke of—the Duke of—is them three links of surrogate Sewish? Sewish looked at the triangle under the name. No, that's Indian writing. It means mountain, he said. Sure, of course. I might have known. The young man said with deep self-scorn, that's a butte, that's old chimney butte, as plain as smoke, made and sold and distributed in the badlands by the Duke of Chimney Butte. Duke, he said solemnly, rising and offering his hand. I'm proud to know you. There was no laughter at this. It was not time to laugh yet. They sat looking at the young man, primed and ready for the big laugh indeed, but holding it for its moment. As gravely as the cowboy had risen, as solemnly as he held his countenance in mock seriousness, Lambert Rosen shook hands with him. The pleasure is mostly mine, said he. Not a flush of embarrassment or resentment in his face, not a quiver of an eyelid, as he looked the other in the face, as if this were some high and mighty occasion in truth. And you're all right, Duke. You're sure all right, cowboy said, a note of admiration in his voice. I'd bet you money he's all right, sewish said, and the others echoed it in nods and grins. The cowboy sat down and rolled a cigarette, passed his tobacco across to Lambert, and they smoked. And no matter if his college hat had been only half as big as it was, or his shirt streaked and spotted, they would have known the stranger for one of their kind, and accepted him as such. Right before the east was light, Lambert noted that another man had ridden in. This was a wiry young fellow with a short nose and fiery face, against which his scant eyebrows and lashes were as white as chalk. His presence in the camp seemed to put a restraint on the spirit of the others, some of whom greeted him by the name Jim, others ignoring him entirely. Among these letter was the black-haired man who had given Lambert his title and elevated him to the nobility of the Badlands. On the face of it there was a crow to be picked between them. Jim was belted with a pistol and healed with a pair of the long-routed Mexican spurs, such as had gone out of fashion on the western range long before this day. He leaned on his elbow near the fire, his legs stretched out in a way that obliged Tartar leg to walk round the spurred boots as he went between his cooking and the supplies in his wagon, the tailboard of which was his kitchen table. If Tartar leg resented this lordly obstruction, he did not discover it by word or feature. He went on humming a tune without words as he worked, handing out biscuits and ham to the hungry crew. Jim had eaten his breakfast already and was smoking a cigarette as his deeds. Now and then he addressed somebody in obscene jocularity. Lambert saw that Jim turned his eyes on him now and then with snaring contempt but said nothing. When the men had made a hasty end of their breakfast, three of them started to the corral. The young man who had humorously enumerated the virtues of the all in one, whom the others called Spence, was of this number. He turned back offering Lambert his hand with a smile. Glad to meet you, Duke, and I hope you'll do well wherever you travel. He said, with such evidence, sincerity, and good feeling, that Lambert felt like he was parting from a friend. Thanks, old velger, and the same to you. Spence went on to saddle his horse whistling as he scruffed through the low sage. Jim sat up. I'll make you whistle through your ribs, he snarled after him. It was Sunday. These men who remained in camp were enjoying the infrequent luxury of a day off. With the first gleam of morning they got out their razors in shape. And Seawish, who seemed to be the handyman and chief counselor of the outfit, cut everybody's hair with the exception of Jim, who had just returned from somewhere on the train, and still had the scent of the barbershop on him. And Tater Leg, who had mastered the art of shingling himself, had kept his hand in by constant practice. Lambert mended his tire using an old rubber boot that Tater Leg found kicking around the camp to plug the big hole in his outer tube. He was going on then, but Seawish and the others pressed him to stay over the day, to which invitation he yielded without great argument. There was nothing ahead of him but desolation, said Tater Leg. A country so rough that it tried a horse to travel it. Ranch houses were further apart as a man proceeded and beyond that mountains. It looked to Tater Leg as if he'd better give it up. That was so according to the opinion of Seawish, to his undoubted knowledge, covering the history of twenty-four years no agent ever had penetrated that far before. Having broken his record on a bicycle, Lambert ought to be satisfied. If he was bound to travel, said Seawish, his advice would be to travel back. It seemed to Lambert that the bottom was all out of his plans indeed. It would be far better to chuck the whole scheme overboard and go to work as a cowboy if they would give him a job. That was nearer the sphere of his intended future activities, that was getting down to the root and foundation of a business, which had a ladder in it, whose rungs were not made of any general agent's hot air. After his hot and heady way of quick decisions and planning to completion before he even had begun, Lambert was galloping the badlands as superintendent of somebody's ranch. Having made the leap over all the trifling years, with the trifling details of hardship, low wages, loneliness, and isolation in a week, from superintendent he galloped swiftly, on his fancy, to a white ranch house by some calm riverside his herds around him his big hat on his head, market quotations coming to him by telegraph every day, packers appealing to him to ship five trainloads at once to save their government contracts. What is the good of an imagination if a man cannot write it? And feel the wind in his face as he flies over the world, even though it is a liar and a trickster, and a rifler of time which a drudge of success would be stamping into gold, and is better for a man than wine. He can return from his wide excursions with no deeper injury than a sigh. Lambert came back to the reality, approaching the subject of a job. Here Jim took notice and cut into the conversation, it being his first word to the stranger. Sure, you can get a job, bud, said, coming over to where Lambert sat with seawash in Tater Lake, the latter peeling potatoes for a stew, somebody having killed a calf. The old man needs a couple of hands. He told me to keep my eye open for anybody that wanted a job. I'm glad to hear of it, said Lambert, warming up at the news, feeling that he must have been a bit severe in his judgment of Jim, which had not been altogether favourable. He'll be over in the morning. You'd better hang around. Seeing the foundation of a new fortune taking shape, Lambert said he would hang around. They all applauded his resolution, for they all appeared to like him in spite of his appearance, which was distinctive indeed among the somber colours of that sage-gray land. Jim inquired if he had a horse, the growing interest of a friend in his manner. Hearing the facts of the case from Lambert before dawn, he had heard them from Tater Lake. He appeared concerned, almost to the point of being troubled. You have to get a horse, Duke. You'll have to ride up to the boss when you hit him up for a job. He never was known to hire a man off the ground, and I guess if you was to head at him on that bicycle, he'd blow a hole through you as big as a can of salmon. Any of you fellers got a horse you want to trade the Duke for his bicycle? The inquiry brought out a round of somewhat cloudy witticism, with proposals to Lambert for an exchange on terms rather embarrassing to meet, seeing that even the least preposterous was not sincere. Tater Lake winked to assure him that it was all banter, without a bit of harm at the bottom of it, which Lambert understood very well without the service of a commentator. Jim brightened up presently as he saw a gleam that might lead Lambert out of the difficulty. He had an extra horse himself, not much of a horse to look at, but as good-hearted a horse a man could ever throw the leg over. And that wasn't no lie, if he took him the right side on. But you had to take him the right side on, and humor him, to handle him like eggs to the guy used to you. Then you had as pretty a little horse as a man ever throwed the leg over anywhere. Jim said he'd offer that horse only he was a little bashful in the presence of strangers, meaning the horse, and didn't show up in a style to make his owner proud of him. The trouble with that horse was he used to belong to a one-legged man, and got so accustomed to the feel of a one-legged man on him that he was plum-foolish between two legs. That horse didn't have much style to him and no gait to speak of, but he was as good a cow horse as ever chaud a bit. If the Duke thought he'd be able to ride him, he was welcome to him. Tater-leg winked, what Lambert interpreted as a warning at that point, and in the faces of the others there were little gleams of humor, which they turned their heads or bent to study the ground as they wished it to hide. Well, I'm not much on a horse, Lambert confessed. You look like a man that had been on a horse a time or two, said Jim, with annoying inflection, a shrewd flattery. I used to ride around a little, but it's been a good while ago. A feller never forgets how to ride, say which put in, and if a man wants to work on the range he's got to ride, lessen he goes and gets him a job running sheep. That's below any man that is a man. Jim sat pondering the question, hands hooked in front of his knees, matching his mouth beside his unlighted cigarette. I've been thinking, I'd sell that horse, he said reflectively, ain't got no use for him much, but I don't know. He looked off over the chuck wagon through the tops of the scrub pines, in which the camp was set, drawing his thin white eyebrows, considering the case. Winter coming and hay to buy, said say which. That's what I've been thinking and studying over, shucks. I don't need that horse to tell you what I'll do, Duke. Turning to Lambert, brisk as with a gush of sudden generosity. If you can ride that old pelter, I'll give him to you for a present, and I bet you'll not get as cheap an offer of a horse as that ever in your life again. I think it's too generous. I wouldn't want to take advantage of it, Lambert told him, trying to show a modesty in the manner that he did not feel. I ain't a favoring you, Duke, not a dollar. If I needed that horse, I'd hang on to him, and you wouldn't get him a cent under thirty-five bucks. But when a man don't need a horse, and it's an expense to him, he can afford to give it away. He can give it away and make money. That's what I'm doing. If you want to take me up, I'll take a look at him, Jim. Jim got up with eagerness, and went to fetch a saddle and bridle from under the wagon. The others came into the transaction with library interest. Only tater leg edged round to Lambert and whispered, with his head turned away to look like innocence. Watch out for him. He's a bald-faced hyenae. They trooped off to the corral, which was a temporary enclosure made of wire run among the little pines. Jim brought the horse out, it stood tamely enough to be saddled, with head drooping indifferently, and showed no deeper interest and no resentment over the operation of bridling. Jim, talking all the time, he worked like the faker that he was to draw a too-close inspection of his wares. Old Whetstone ain't much to look at, he said, and as I told you, mister, he ain't got no fancy gait, but he can bust the middle out of the breeze when he lays out a straight-ahead run. Ain't a horse on this range can touch his tail when Old Whetstone throws a ham into it and lets out his strength. It looks like he might go, some Lambert commented, in a vacous way of a man who felt he must say something, even though he didn't know anything about it. Whetstone was rather above the stature of the general run of range horses, with clean legs and a good chest, but he was a hammer-headed, white-eyed, short-meined beast of a pale watercolor yellow, like an old dish. He had a beating down bedraggled and dispirited to look about him, as if he had carried man's burdens beyond his strength for a good while, and had no heart in him to take the road again. He had a scoundrel-y way of rolling his eyes to watch all that went on about him, without turning his head. Jim girthed him and cinched him soundly and securely, for no matter who was pitched off and smashed up in the ride, he didn't want the saddle to turn and be ruined. Well, there it stands, Duke. Saddle and bridle goes with him, if you're able to ride him. I'll be generous. I won't go halfway with you. I'll be whole-hog or none. Saddle and bridle goes with Whetstone. All a free gift you can ride him, Duke. I want to start you upright. It was a safe offer, taking all precedent into account, for no man had ever ridden Whetstone, not even his owner. The beast was an outlaw of the most pronounced type, with a repertory of tricks calculated to get a man off his back, so extensive that he never seemed to repeat. He stood always as docilely as a camel to be saddled, bridled. With what method in his apparent docility no man versed in horse philosophy ever had been able to reason out, perhaps it was that he'd been born with a spite against man, and this was his scheme for luring them out of his discomforture and disgrace. It was an expectant little group that stood by to witness this greenhorn's rise and fall, according to his established methods. Whetstone would allow him to mount, still standing with that indifferent group of his head, but one who was sharp would observe that he was rolling his old wide eyes back to sea, tipping his sharp ear like a wildcat to hear every scraping creak of the leather. Then, with the man in a saddle, nobody knew what he would do. That uncertainty was what made Whetstone valuable, and interesting beyond any outlaw in the world. Men grew accustomed to the tricks of ordinary pitching Broncos in time, and the novelty and charm were gone. Besides, there nearly always was somebody who could ride the worst of them. Not so Whetstone. He had won a good deal of money for Jim, and everybody in camp knew that thirty-five dollars wasn't more than a third of the value that his owner put upon him. There was boundless wonder among them, then, and no little admiration when this stranger who had come into that unlikely place on a bicycle leaped into the saddle so quickly that old Whetstone was taken completely by surprise, and held him with such a strong hand and stiff rein that his initiative was taken from him. The Greenhorn's next maneuver was to swing the animal round till they lost his head, then clap heels to him and send him off as if he had business for the day laid out ahead of him. It was the most amazing start that anybody had been known to make on Whetstone, and the most startling and enjoyable thing about it was that this strange overgrown boy with his open face and guileless speech had played them all for a bunch of suckers, and knew more about riding in a minute than they ever had learned in their lives. Jim Wilder stood by, swearing by all his obscene deities that if that man hurt Whetstone, he'd kill him for his hide, but he began to feel better in a little while. Hope, even certainty, picked up again. Whetstone was coming to himself. Perhaps you'll rascal had only been elaborating his scheme a little at the start, and was now about to show them that their faith in him was not misplaced. The horse had come to a sudden stop, leg stretched so wide apart, it seemed as if he surely must break in the middle, but he gathered his feet together so quickly that the next view presented him with his back arched like a fighting cat, and there on top of him rode the Duke. His small brown hat in place, his gray shirt ruffling in the wind. After that there came so quickly that it made the mind and eye hastened to follow all the tricks that Whetstone ever had tried in his past triumphs over men, and through all of them sharp, shrewd, unexpected, startling as some of them were. The little brown hat rode untroubled on top. Whole Whetstone was as wet at the end of ten minutes as if he had swum a river. He grunted with anger as he heaved and lashed. He squealed in his resentful passion as he swerved, lunged, pitched, and clawed the air. The little band of spectators cheered the Duke, calling loudly to inform him that he was the only man who had ever stuck that long. The Duke waved his handed acknowledgement and put it back on with deliberation and exactness, while whole Whetstone, as mad as a wet hand, tried to roll down suddenly and crush his legs. Nothing to be accomplished by that old trick. The Duke pulled him up with a wrench that made him squeal, and Whetstone lifted his four legs, attempted to complete the backward turn, and catch his tormentor under the saddle. But that was another trick so old that the simplest horseman knew how to meet it. The next thing he knew? Whetstone was galloping along like a gentleman, just wind enough in him to carry him, not an ounce to spare. Jim Wilder was swearing himself blue. It was a trick and imposition, he declared. No circus rider could come out here and abuse old Whetstone that way and live to eat his dinner. Nobody appeared to share his view of it. They were a unit in declaring that the Duke beat any man handling a horse they ever saw. If Whetstone didn't get him off pretty soon, he would be whipped and conquered his belly on the ground. If he hurts that horse, I'll blow a hole in him as big as a can of salmon. Jim declared, Take your medicine like a man. See why I should advise you might know somebody had come along that had tried him in time. Yeah, come along, said Jim with a sneer. Whetstone had begin to collect himself out on the flat along the sage brush a quarter of a mile away. The frenzy of desperation was in him. He was resorting to the raw low common tricks of the ordinary outlaw, even to biting at his rider's legs. That un-gentlemanly behavior was costly as he quickly learned at the expense of a badly cut mouth. He never had been a rider before, who had energy to spare from his efforts to stick in the saddle, to slam him a big kick in the mouth when he doubled himself to make that vicious snap. The sound of that kick carried to the corral. I'll fix you for that, Jim swore. He was breathing as hard as his horse, sweat of anxiety running down his face. The Duke was bringing the horse back. His spirit pretty well broken, it appeared. What do you care what he does to him? Ain't your horse no more. It was Tater Leger, said that, standing near Jim, a little way behind him as gorgeous as a bridegroom in the bright sun. You fellas can't wring me in on no game like that and beat me out of my horse. Said Jim, redder than ever in his passion. Who do you mean rung you in, you little flannel-faced fisty? C. Y. demanded, whirling around on him with blood in his eye. Jim was standing with his legs apart, bent a little at the knees as if he intended to make a jump. His right hand was near the butt of his gun, his fingers were clasping and unclasping as if he limbered them for action. Tater Leger slipped up behind him on his toes and jerked the gun from Jim Scabbard with quick and sure hand. He backed away with it, presenting it with determined humane as Jim turned on him and cursed him by all his lurid gods. If you fight anybody in this camp to-day, Jim, you'll fight like a man, said Tater Leg, or you'll hobble out on three legs like a wolf. The Duke was riding old whetstone like a feather, letting him have his spurts of kicking and stiff-legged bouncing without any effort to restrain him at all. There wasn't much steam in the outlaws' antics now. Any common man could have ridden him without losing his hat. Jim had drawn apart from the others, resentful of the distrust that Tater Leger had shown, but more than half of his courage and bluster taken away from him with his gun. He was swearing more volubly than ever to cover his other deficiencies, but he was a man to be feared only when he had a weapon under his hand. The Duke had brought the horse almost back to camp when the animal was taken with an extraordinary vicious spasm of pitching, broken by sudden efforts to fling himself down and roll over on his persistent rider. The Duke let him have his way, all but the rolling. For a while then he appeared to lose patience with the stubborn beast. He headed him into the open, laid the court to him and galloped towards the hills. That's the move! Run the devil out of him, said one. The Duke kept him going, and going, for all there was in him, horse and rider, were dim in the dust of the heated race against the evil passion the untamed demon in the savage creature's heart. It began to look as if Lambert never intended to come back. Jim saw it that way. He came over to Tater Lega as hot as a hornet. Give me that gun! I'm going after him. You'll have to go without it, Jim. Jim blasted him to a sulfurous perdition and split him with forked lightning from his blasphemous tongue. He'll come back. He's just running the vinegar out of him, said one. Come back, hell, said Jim! If you don't come back, that's his business. A man can go wherever he wants to go on his own horse, I guess. That was the observation of Seewish, standing there, rather glum and out of tune over Jim's charge, that they had wrung the duke in on him to beat him out of his animal. It was a put-up job. I'll split that filler like a hog. Jim left them with that declaration of his benevolent intention, hurrying to the corral where his horse was, his saddle on the ground by the gate. They watched him, saddle and saw him mount and ride after the duke, with no comment on his actions at all. The duke was out of sight in the scrubbed timber at the foot of the hills, but the dust still floated like the wake of a swift boat, showing the way he had gone. Yes, you will, said Tater Lega. Meaningless, irrelevant. As the fragmentary ejaculation seemed, the others understood. They grinned and twisted wise heads, spit out their tobacco, and went back for dinner. CHAPTER III The duke was seen coming back before the meal was over, across the little plain between camp and hills. A quarter of a mile behind him, Jim Wilder rode. Brother seen or unseen by the man in the lead they did not know. Jim had fallen behind somewhat by the time the duke reached the camp. The admiration of all hands over his triumph against horse-flesh and the devil within it was so great that they got up to welcome the duke and shake hands with him as he left the saddle. He was as fresh and nimble, unshaken and serene as when he mounted old whetstone, more than an hour before. Whetstone was a conquered beast, beyond any man's doubt. He stood with flaring nostrils, scooping in his breath, not a dry hair on him, not a dash of vinegar in his veins. CHAPTER VI Where's Jim? The duke inquired. CHAPTER VI Gummin? Tetherlegre wide, waving his hand afield. CHAPTER VI What was he doing? Up there. Where's he been? The duke inquired, a puzzled look in his face, searching their sober contenances, for his answer. CHAPTER VI Hey, thought you— CHAPTER VI Let him do his own talking, kid, said Seawash, cutting off the cowboy's explanation. Seawash looked at the duke shrewdly, his head cocked to one side, like a robin, listening for a worm. CHAPTER VI What outfit was you with before you started out selling them tooth-puller can opener machine, son? He inquired. CHAPTER VI Outfit? What kind of an outfit? Ranch? Innersense? What range was you riding on? CHAPTER VI I never rode any range, I'm sorry to say. Well, where in the name of mustard did you learn to ride? Used to break range horses for five dollars ahead at the Kansas City Stockyards. That was a good while ago. I'm all out of practice now. Yes, and I bet you can throw a rope, too. Nothing to speak of. Nothing to speak of, yes. I'll bet you nothing to speak of. Jim didn't stop at the corral to turn in his horse, but came clattering into camp. Matter for the race that the Duke had led him in an ignorance of his pursuit. As every man could see, he flung himself out of the saddle with a flip like a bird taking to wing, his spurs cutting the ground as he came over to where Lambert stood. Maybe you can ride my horse, you damn granger. But you can't ride me, he said. He threw off his vest as he spoke. That being is only superfluous garment and bowed his back for a fight. Lambert looked at him with a flash of indignant contempt spreading in his face. You don't need to get sore about it. I only took you up on your own game, he said. No circus ranger's gonna come in here and beat me on my horse. You either put him back in that corral or you'll chaw a letter with me. Put him back in the corral when I'm ready, but I'll put him back in mine. I want him on your own bed. And it'll take a whole lot better man than you to take him away from me. In the manner of youth and independence Lambert got hotter with every word and after that there wasn't much room for anything else to be said on either side. They mixed it. They mixed it briskly. For Jim's contempt for a man who wore a hat like that supplied the courage that had been drained from him when he was disarmed. There was nothing epic in the fight, nothing heroic at all. It was a wildcat struggling to dust, no more science on either side than nature put into their hands at the beginning. But they surely did kick up a lot of dust. It would have been a peaceful enough fight with a handshake at the end and all over in an hour. Very likely if Jim hadn't managed to get out his knife when he felt himself in for a trimming. It was a mean-looking knife with a buckhorn handle and a four-inch blade that leaped open on pressure of a spring. Its type was widely popular all over the West in those days, but one of them would be almost a curiosity now. But Jim had it out anyhow, lying on his back with the duke's knee on his ribs and was whittling away before any man could raise a hand to stop him. The first slice split the duke's cheek for two inches just below his eye. The next story shirts leave from shoulder to elbow, grazing the skin as it passed, and there is somebody kick Jim's elbow and knock the knife out of his hand. "'Let him up, duke,' he said. Lambert released the strangle hold that he had taken on Jim's throat and looked up. It was spence, standing there with his horse behind him. He laid his hand on Lambert's shoulder. "'Let him up, duke,' said again. Lambert got up, bleeding a cataract. Jim bounced to his feet like a spring. His hand to his empty holster. A look of dismay and his blanching face. "'That's your size, you nigger,' Spence said, kicking the knife beyond Jim's reach. That's the kind of lowdown cuss you always was. This man's our guest. When you pull a knife on him, you pull it on me. "'You know I ain't got no gun on me. You get it, you sneaky hound.' Jim looked round for Tatterleg. "'Where'd my gun, you greasy pot slinger?' Give it to him. Whoever's got it.' Tatterleg produced it. Jim began backing off as soon as he had it in his hand, watching Spence alertly. Lambert leaped between them. "'Gentlemen, don't go to shooting over a little thing like this,' he begged. Tatterleg came between them also and, see-wash, quite blocking up the fairway. "'Now, boys, put up your guns. This is Sunday, you know,' see-wash said. "'Give me room, men,' Spence commanded, in a voice that trembled with passion, with the memory of old quarrels, old wrongs, which this last insult to the camp's guest gave the excuse for wiping out. There was something in his tone not to be denied. They fell out of his path as if the wind had blown them. Jim fired his elbow against his ribs. Too confident of his own speed, or forgetting that, Wilder already had his weapon out. Spence crumpled at the knees, toppled backward, fell. His pistol, half drawn, dropped from the holster and lay at his side. Wilder came a step nearer and fired another shot into the fallen man's body, dead as he must have known him to be. He ran on to his horse, mounted, and rode away. Some of the others hurried to the wagon after the guns. Lambert, for a moment, shocked to the heart by the sudden horror of the tragedy bent over the body of the man who had taken up his quarrel without even knowing the merits of it, or whose fault lay at the beginning. A look into his face was enough to tell. There was nothing within the compass of this earth that could bring back life to that strong young body. Struck down in a breath like a broken vase. He looked up. Jim Wilder was bending in the saddle as he rode swiftly away, as if he expected them to shoot. A great fire of resentment for this man's destructive deed swept over him, hotter than a hot blood washing from his wounded cheek. The passion of vengeance wrenched his joints, his hands shook, and grew cold, as he stooped again to unfasten the belt about his friend's dead body. Armed with a weapon that had been drawn a fraction of a second too late, drawn in the surest defense of hospitality, the high courtesy of an obligation to a stranger, Lambert mounted the horse that had come to be his at the price of this tragedy, and galloped in pursuit of the fleeing man. Some of the young men were hurrying to the quarrel, belting on their guns as they ran to fetch their horses, and joined the pursuit. Seawash called them back. "'Leave it to him, boys.' It's all his by rights,' he said. Tatterleague stood looking after the two riders. The hindmost drawing steadily upon the leader, and stood looking so until they disappeared in a timber at the base of the hills. "'My God!' said he. And again after a little while, my God!' It was dusk when Lambert came back, leading Jim Wilder's horse. It was blood on the empty saddle. The Duke of Chimney Butte, by G. W. Ogden, Chapter 4 And speak in passing. The events of that Sunday introduced Lambert into the badlands, and established his name and fame. Within three months after going to work for the syndicate ranch, he was known for a hundred miles, around as a man who had broken Jim Wilder's outlaw, and won the horse, by that unparalleled feat. That was the prop to his fame, that he had broken Jim Wilder's outlaw. Certainly, he was admired and commended for the unhesitating action he had taken in avenging the death of his friend, but in that he had done only what was expected of any man worthy of the name. Breaking the outlaw was a different matter entirely, and doing that he had accomplished what was believed to be beyond the power of any living man. According to his own belief, his own conscience, Lambert, had made a bad start. A career that had its beginning in contentions and violence, enough of it crowded into one day to make more than the allotment of an ordinary life, could not terminate with any degree of felicity and honor. They thought little of killing a man in that country, it seemed no more than a punctuary inquiry, to fulfill the letter of the law hadn't been made by the authorities into Jim Wilder's death. While it relieved him to know that the law held his justification to be ample, there was a shadow following him which he could not evade in any of the hilarious diversions common to those wild souls of the range. It troubled him that he had killed a man, even if in a fair fight in the open field, with the justification of society at its back. In his sleep, it hered him with visions, awake and oppressed him, like a sorrow, for the memory of a shame, he became solemn and silent, as a chastened man, seldom smiling, laughing never. When he drank with his companions in that little saloon at Misery, the loading station on the railroad, he took his liquor as gravely as the sacrament. When he raced them, he rode back to his home, and rode with face grim as an Indian, never whooping in victory, never swearing in defeat. He had left even his own lawful and proper name behind him, with his past. Far nearer he was known as the Duke of Chimney Butte, shortened in cases of direct address to Duke. He didn't resent it, rather took a sort of grim pride in it, although he felt at times that it was one more mark of his surrender to circumstances whose current he might have avoided at the beginning by the exercise of a proper man's sense. A man was expected to drink, a good deal of the over-ardened spirits which were sold at Misery. If he could drink without becoming noisy, so much more his credit, so much higher he stood than the estimation of his fellows as a copper-bottom sport of the true blood. The Duke could put more of that notorious whiskey undercover and still contain himself than any man they had ever seen in Misery. The more he drank, the glummer he became, but he never had been known either to weep or curse. Older men spoke to him with respect, younger ones approached him with admiration, unable to understand what kind of a safety valve a man had on his mouth that would keep his steam in when that Misery booze began to sizzle in his pipes. His horse was a subject of interest almost equal to himself. Under his hand-old wet stone, although not more than seven had developed unexpected qualities, when the animal's persecution ceased, his pervasity fled. He grew into a well-conditioned creature, sleek of coat, beautiful of tail as an Arab barb. Bright of eye, handsome to behold, his speed and endurance were, it matters, of as much note as his outlawry had been but a little while before, and his intelligence was something almost beyond belief. Lambert had grown exceedingly fond of him, holding him more in the estimation of a companion than the valuation of a dumb creature of burden. When they rode the long watches at night he talked to him, and wet stone would put back his sensitive ear and listen, and toss his head in joyful appreciation of his master's confidence and praise. Few horses had beaten wet stone in a race since he became the Duke's property. It was believed that none on the range could do it if the Duke wanted to put him to his limit. It was said that the Duke lost only such races as he felt necessary to the common continuance of his prosperity. Racing was one of the main diversions when the cowboys from the surrounding ranches met at Misry on a Sunday afternoon, or when loading cattle there. Few trains stopped at Misry, a circumstance resented by the cowboys who believed the place should be as important to all the world as it was to them. To show their contempt for this aloof behavior, they usually raced the trains, frequently outrunning those westward bound as they labored up the long grade. Great trains especially, they took delight in beating, seeing how it netled the train crews. There was nothing more delightful in any program of amusement that a cowboy could conceive than riding a breast of a laboring freight engine, a sulky engineer crowding every pound of power into the cylinders as sooty firemen humping his back throwing in coal. Only one triumph would have been sweeter, to outrun the big passenger train from Chicago with the brass-fenced car at the end. No man had ever done that yet, although many had tried. The engineers all knew what to expect on a Sunday afternoon when they approached Misry, where the cowboys came to the fence and raced the trains on the right-of-way. A long level stretch of soft gray earth, set with bunches of grass here and there, begun a mile beyond the station, unmarred by steam shovel or grater scraper. Man could ride it with his eyes shut, a horse could cover it at its best. That was the racing ground over which they had contended with the Chicago Puget Sound Flyer for many years, and a place which engineers and firemen prepared to pass quickly, while yet a considerable distance away. It was a sight to see the big engine round the curve below its plume of smoke rising straight for 20 feet, streaming back like a running girl's hair. The cowboys all set in their saddles, waiting to go. Engineers on the flyer were not so sulky about it, knowing that the race was theirs before it was run. Usually, they leaned out of the window and urged riders on with beckoning derisive hand, while the firemen stood by confident of the head of steam he had begun storing for this emergency far down the road. Porters told passengers about those wild horsemen in advance, and eager faces lined the windows on that side of their cars as they approached Misery, and all who could pack on the end of the observation car assembled there, in spite of its name. Misery was quite a comfortable break for the day's monotony for travelers on a Sunday afternoon. Amid the hardships and scant diversions of this life, Lambert spent his first winter in the Badlands, drinking in the noisy rebels at Misery, riding the long, bitter miles back to the ranch, despising himself for being so mean and low. It was a life in which a man's soul would either shrink to nothing or expanded till it became too large to find contentment within the horizon of such an existence. Some of them expanded up to the size for ranch owners. Superintendents' bosses stopped there. Set in their mold, Lambert never had heard of one stretching so wide that it was drawn out of himself entirely, his eyes fixed on the far light of a no-brow life. He liked to imagine a man so inspired out of the lonely watches the stormy rides, the battle against blizzard and night. The train of thought had carried him away that gentle spring day as he rode to Misery. He resented the thought that he might have to spend his youth as a hired servant in this rough occupation, unrenumerably below the hope of ever gaining enough to make a start in business for himself. There was no romance in it for all that had been written. No beautiful daughter of the ranch owner would be married, and a fortune gained with her. Daughters there must be indeed among the many stockholders in that big business, but they were not available in the Badlands. The superintendent of the ranch had three or four born to that estate full of loud laughter or ordinary bailed hay. A man would be a loser in marrying such as they, even with a fortune ready made. What better could that rough country offer? People are no gentler than their pursuits, no finer than the requirements of their lives. Daughters of the Badlands, such as he had seen of them and the wives to whom he once had tried to sell the all-in-one, and the superintendent's girls were not intended for any other life. As for him, if he had to live out there with the shadow of a dead man at his heels, he would live it alone. So he thought, going on his way to misery, where there was to be racing that afternoon and a grand effort to keep up with the Chicago Flyer. Lambert had never taken part in the long-standing competition and appeared to him a senseless expenditure of horse flesh at a childish pursuit of the wind. Yet foolish as it was, he liked to watch them. There was a thrill in the sweeping start of 20 or 30 horsemen that warmed a man, making him feel as if he must whoop and wave his hat. There was a belief alive among them that someday a man would come who would run the train neck to neck to the depot platform. Not much distinction in it, even so, said he, but it set him musing and considering, as he wrote, his face quickening out of its somber cloud. A little while after his arrival at misery, the news went around that the Duke was willing at last to enter the race against the Flyer. True to his peculiarities, the Duke had made conditions. He was willing to race, but only if everybody else would keep out of it and give him a clear and open field. Teter Lake Wilson, the bow-legged camp cook of the syndicate, circulated himself like a petition to gain consent to his unusual proposal. It was asking a great deal of these men to give up their established aversion, no matter how distinguished the man and whose favor they were requested to stand aside. That Sunday afternoon race had become as much a fixed institution in the Badlands, says the railroad itself, with some arguments, some bucking and snorting. A considerable cause to Teter Lake for liquor and cigars agreed to it. Teter Lake said he could state, authoritatively, that this would be the Duke's first, last, and only right against the Flyer. It would be worth money to stand off and watch it, he said, and worth putting money on the result. When, where, would a man ever have a chance to see such a race again? Perhaps, never in his life. On time to the dot, the station agent told the committee headed by Teter Lake, which had gone to inquire in the grave in an important manner of men, conducting a ceremony. The committee went back to the saloon and pressed the Duke to have a drink, he refused, as he had refused politely and consistently all day. A man could fight on booze, he said, but it was a mighty poor foundation for business. There was a larger crowd in misery that day than usual, for the time of year, it being the first general holiday after the winter's hard exactations. In addition to visitors, all misery turned out to see the race, lining up at the right-of-way fence as far as they would go, which was not a great distance along, the saloon keeper could see the finish from his door. On the start of it, he was not concerned, but he had money up on the end. Lambert hadn't as much flesh by a good many pounds as he had carried into the badlands on his bicycle, one who had known him previously would have thought that seven years had passed him, making him over completely. Indeed, since then, his face was thin, browned and weathered, his body sinewy, its leanness aggravated by its length. He was as light in the saddle as a leaf on the wind. He was quite a barbaric figure as he waited to mount and ride against the train, which could be heard whistling far down the road, coatless and flannel shirt of bright silk anchorchief round his neck, calfskin vest, tanned with a hair on, its color red and white, dressed leather chaps, a pair of boots that had cost him two-thirds of a month's pay. His hat was like forty others in the crowd dough-colored, worn with high crown, full-standing, a leather thong at the back of his head, the brim drooping a bit from the weather, so broad that his face looked narrower and sharper in its shadow. Nothing like the full-blooded young Aggie who had come into the Badlands to find his fortune a little less than a year before, and about as different from him in thought and outlook upon life as in physical appearance. The psychology of environment is a powerful force. A scorer or more of horsemen were strung out along the course, where they had stationed themselves to watch the race at its successive stages and cheer their champion on his way. At the starting point, the Duke waited alone at the station a crowd of cowboys lulled in their saddles, not caring to make a run to see the finish. It was customary for the horsemen who raced the flyer to wait on the ground until the engine rounded the curb, then mount and settle to the race. It was counted fair also, owing to the headway the train already had to start a hundred yards or so before the engine came abreast in order to limber up to the horse's best speed. For two miles or more, the track ran straight after that curb. Misery about the middle of the stretch, in that long straight reach, the builders of the road had begun the easement of the stiff grade through the hills beyond. It was the beginning of a hard climb, a stretch in which westbound trains gathered headway to carry them over the top. Engines came patting around that curb, laboring with the strain of their load, speed reduced half, and dropping a bit lower as they proceeded up the grade. This Sunday, as usual, the train crew and passengers were on the lookout for the game's sportsman of Misery. Already the engineer was leaning out of his window, arm extended, ready to give the derisive challenge to come on as he swept by. The Duke was in the saddle, holding in wet stone with stiff rain, for the animal was trembling with eagerness to spring away, knowing very well from the preparations which had been going forward, that some big event in the lives of his master in himself was pending. The Duke held him, looking back over his shoulder, measuring the distance as the train came sweeping grandly around the curb. He waited until the engine was with a hundred feet of him, before he loosened rain and let old wet stone go. A yell ran up the line of spectators as the pale yellow horse reached out his long neck, chin level against the wind like a swimmer, and ran as no horse ever had run on that race course before. Every horseman knew that the Duke was still holding him in, allowing the train to creep up on him, as if he scorned to take advantage of the handicap. The engineer saw this was going to be a different kind of race from the yelling, chattering troop of wild riders, which he had been outrunning with unbroken regularity. In that yellow streak of a horse, that low bending bony rider, he saw a possibility of defeat and disgrace. His head disappeared out of the window, his derisive hand vanished. He was turning valves and pulling levers, trying to coach a little more power into his piston strokes. The Duke held wet stone back until his wind had set to the labor. His muscles flexed, his sinews stretched to the race. A third of the race was covered. When the engine came neck and neck with the horse, and the engineer confident now leaned far out, swinging his hand over like an orb of odin, he shouted, come on, come on, just a moment too soon, this confidence, a moment too soon, this defiance. It was the Duke's program to run this thing neck and neck, force to force, with no advantage asked or taken. Then if he could gather speed and beat the engine on the homestretch, no man on the train or off, could say that he had done it with the advantage of a handicap. There was a great whooping, a great thumping of hoofs, a monstrous swirl of dust, as the riders at the side of the race course saw the Duke maneuver and read his intention. A way they swept, a noisy troop, like a flight of blackbirds hats off, guns popping in the scramble to get up as close to the finish line as possible. Never before in the long history of that unique contest had there been so much excitement, porters opened the vestibule doors, allowing passengers to crowd the steps, windows were open, heads thrust out, every tongue urging the horsemen on with cheers. The Duke was riding beside the engineer, not ten feet between them, more than half the course was run, and there the Duke hung, the engineer not gaining an inch. The engineer was on his feet now, hand on a throttle lever, although it was open as wide as it could be pulled. The fireman was throwing coal into the furnace, looking round over his shoulder, and now and then the persistent horseman, who would not be outrun, his eyes white in his grimy face. On the observation car, women hung over the rail at the side, waving handkerchiefs at the rider, back along the fence, the inhabitants of misery, broke away like leaves before a wind, and went running toward the depot, ahead of the racing horse and engine. The mounted men, who had taken a big start, rode on towards the station in a wild, delirious charge. Neck and neck with the engine, old wet stone ran, throwing his long legs like a wolf-hound, his long neck stretched his ears flat, not leaving a hair that he could control, outstanding to catch the wind. The engineer was peering ahead with fixed eyes now, as if he feared to look again at this puny combination of horse and man, that was holding its own in this unequal trial of strength. Within 300 yards of the station platform, which sloped down at the end, like a continuation of the course, the Duke touched wet stone's neck with the tips of his fingers, as if he had given a signal upon which they had agreed the horse gathered power, grunting as he used a grunt in the days of his old outlawry, and bounded away from the cab window, where the greasy engineer stood with white face and set jaw. Yard by yard, the horse gained his long mane flying, his long tail of stream, foam on his lips, foraging past the great driving wheels, which ground against the rails, past the swinging piston, past the powerful black cylinders, past the stubby pilot, advancing like a shadow over the track, when wet stones have struck the planks of the platform marking the end of the course, he was more than the length of the engine in the lead. The Duke sat there waving his hands solemnly to those who cheered him as the trains swept past. The punches around him lifting up a joyful chorus of shots and shouts, showing off on their own account to a considerable extent, but sincere overall because of the victory that the Duke had won. Old wet stone was standing where he had stopped within a few feet of the track, front hoofs on the boards of the platform, not more than nicely warmed up for another race that appeared. As the observation car passed, a young woman leaned over the rail, handkerchief, reached out to the Duke as if trying to give it to him. He saw her only a second before she passed, too late to make even a futile attempt to possess the favor of her appreciation. She laughed, waving it to him, holding it out as if in challenge for him to come and take it, without wasting a precious fragment of a second in hesitation, the Duke sent wet stone thundering along the platform in pursuit of the train. It seemed a foolish thing to do in a risky venture, for the platform was old, as planks were weak in places. It was not above 100 feet long and beyond it, only a short stretch of right away until the public road crossed the track. The fence running down the cattle guard, blocking his hopes of overtaking the train. More than that, the train was picking up speed as if the engineer wanted to get out of sight, and hearing of that demonstrative crowd, and he put his humiliation behind him as quickly as possible. No man's horse could make a start with planks under his feet, run 200 yards and overtake that train, no matter what the inducement. That was the thought of every man who sat in saddle there and stretched his neck to witness this unparalleled streak of folly. If wet stone had run swiftly in the first race, he fairly whistled through the air like a wild duck in the second, before he had run the lengther platform, he had gained on the train his nose almost even with the brass railing over which the girl leaned, the handkerchief in her hand, midway between the platform and the cattle guard, they saw the duke lean in his saddle, snatched the white favor from her hand. The people on the train cheered this feat of quick resolution, quicker action, but the girl whose handkerchief the duke had won, only leaned on the railing, holding fast with both hands, as if she offered her lips to be kissed and looked at him, with a pleasure in her face that he could read as the train bore her onward into the west. The duke sat there with his hat in his hand gazing after her, only her straining face in his vision centered out of the dust and widening distance, like a star that a man gazes on to fix his course, before it is overwhelmed by clouds. The duke sat watching after her, the train reducing the distance like a vision that melts out of the heart with a sigh. She raised her hand as the dust closed in the wake of the train. He thought she beckoned him, so she came and went, crossing his way in the badlands in that hour of his small triumph, and left her perfumed token of appreciation in his hand. The duke put it away in the pocket of his shirt beneath the calfskin vest, the faint delicacy of its perfume rising to his nostrils, like the elusive scent of a violet, or which one searches the woodland and cannot find. The dusty hills had gulped the train, that carried her before the duke rode round the station, and joined his noisy comrades. Everybody shook hands with him, everybody invited him to have a drink. He put them off, friend, acquaintance, stranger, on their pressing invitation to drink. With a declaration that his horse came first in his consideration, after he had put wet stone in the lily barn and fed him, he would join them for a round, he said. They trooped into the saloon to square their bets, the duke going his way to the barn. There they drank and grew noisier than before to come out from time to time mount their horses, gallop up and down the road, that answered misery for a street, and shoot good ammunition into the harmless air. Somebody remarked after a while that the duke was a long time feeding his horse, tartar leg, and others went to investigate. He had not been there, the keeper of the lily barn said, a further look around exhausted all the possible hiding places of misery. The duke was not there. Well, said tartar leg puzzled. I guess he went. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of the Duke of Chimney Butte This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Duke of Chimney Butte by G. W. Ogden Chapter 5 Feet upon the road I always thought I'd go out west, but somehow I never got around to it. Tatar leg said, How far do you aim to go, duke? Far, the notion takes me, I guess. It was about a month after the race that this talk between tartar leg and duke took place, on a calm afternoon in a camp far from the site, of that one into which the peddler of cutlery had trundled his disabled bicycle a year before. The duke had put off his calfskin vest, the weather being too hot for it. Even tartar leg had made sacrifices to appearance in favour of comfort, his piratical corduroy being replaced by overalls. The duke had quit his job, moved by the desire to travel on, and see the world, he said. He said no word to any man about the motive behind that desire, very naturally, for he was not the kind of man who opened the door of his heart. Between himself he confessed the hunger for an unknown face, for the lure of an onward beckoning hand, which he was no longer able to ignore. Since that day she had strained over the brass railing of the car to hold him in her sight until the curtain of dust intervened, he had felt her call urging him into the west, the strength of her beckoning hand drawing him the way she had gone. To search the world for her and find her on some full and glorious day. I was aiming to sell what stone and go on to train duke? No, not going to sell him yet while. The duke was not a talkative man on any occasion, and now he sat in silence watching the cook kneading out a batch of bread, his thoughts a thousand miles away. Where, indeed, was the journey that he was shaping in his intention that minute carry him? Somewhere along the railroad between there and the Puget Sound, the beckoning lady had left to train, somewhere on that long road between mountain and sea, she was waiting for him to come. Tadder Lake stuck at his loaves in the sun to rise for the oven, making a considerable rattling about the stove as he put in the fire. A silence fell. Lambert was waiting for his horse to rest a few hours, and waiting till he sent his dreams ahead of him, where his feet could not follow, saved by weary roads and… slow. Between misery and the end of that real road at the western sea, there were many villages, a few cities, a passenger, might a light from the Chicago Flyer at any one of them, and be absorbed in the vastness like a drop of water in the desert plain. How was he to know where she had left the train, or whether she had turned afterward her journey, or where she lodged now? It seemed beyond finding out, assuredly, it was a task too great for the life of youth so ever-vescent in the score of time, even though so long and heavy to those impatient dreamers who draw themselves onward by its golden chain to the cold, harsh facts of age. It was a foolish quest, a hopeless one. So reason said, romance and youth and a longing that he could not define, rose to confute the sober argument, fleshed and eager, violet scent, blowing before. But could I tell? Perhaps rash speculations, faint promises. The world was not so broad that two might never meet in it whose ways had touched for one heartthrob, and sundered again on the side. All his life he had been hearing that it was a small place after all, was said. Perhaps, and who can tell? So galloping onward in the relays of his ardent dreams. When was your aim in to start, Duke? Tetherlegge inquired after a silence so long that Lambert had forgotten he was there. And about an hour. I wasn't trying to hurry up, Duke. My reason for asking you was because I thought maybe I might be able to go along with you a piece of the way, if you don't object in my kind of company. Why, you're not going to jump the job, are you? Yes, I've been thinking it over, and I've made up my mind to draw my time to-night. If you'll put off going to mornin', I'll start with you. We can travel together till our roads branch anyhow. I'll be glad to wait for you, old Feller. I didn't know which way. Walming, said Tetherlegge sighing, has come back on me again. Well, Feller has to rove and ramble, I guess. Tetherlegge sighed, looking off westward with dreamy eyes. Yes, if he's got a girl pulling on his heart, said he. The Duke started as if he had been accused. The secret red is so laid bare. He felt the blood burn in his face and mount to his eyes like a drift of smoke. But Tetherlegge was unconscious of his sudden embarrassment. This flash of panic for the thing which the Duke believed lay so deep in his heart no man could ever find it out, and laugh at it or make gay over the assented romance. Tetherlegge was still looking off in a general direction that was westward, little south of west. She's in Wyoming, said Tetherlegge. Lady I used to rush out in the Great Bend, Kansas a long time ago. Oh, said the Duke, relieved and interested. How long ago was that? Oh, over four years, said Tetherlegge, as if it might have been a quarter of a century. Not very long, Tetherlegge. Yes, but a lot of fellows can quarter girl in four years, Duke. The Duke thought it over a spell. Yes, I reckon they can, he loud. Did she ever write to you? I guess I'm more to blame than she is on that Duke. She did write, but I was kind of sour and dropped her. Hard to get away from, though it's coming over me again. I might have been married and settled down with that girl now. Me and her running an oyster parlor in some good little railroad town that hadn't been for a Welshman named Elwood. He was a stone cutter, that Elwood fellow, was Duke, working on bridge basement in the Santa Fe. That fellow told her I was married and had four children. He came between us and bust us up. Wasn't that on me, said the Duke Fingley? I was chef in a hotel where that girl worked, waiting table, drawing down good money and saving it, too. But that darn Welshman got around her and she groved cold. When she left Great Bend, she went to Wyoming to take a job. Lander was the town she wrote from. I can put my finger on it and map with my shut. I met her when she was leaving from the depot, dragging along her grip, and no Welshman in a mile of her to give her a hand. I went up and tipped my hat, but I never smiled. Duke, for I was sour over the way that girl had treated me. I just took hold of that grip and carried it to the depot for her and tipped my hat to her once more. Your gentleman, whatever they say of you, Mr. Wilson, she said. She did? She did, Duke. You're a gentleman, Mr. Wilson, whatever they say of you. She said. Then was her words, Duke? Farewell to you, I said, distant and high and mighty for— I was hurt, Duke. I was hurt right down to the bone. Bet you was, old feller. Farewell to you, I says, and tears come in her eyes, and she says to me, wiping them on a handkerchief, I give her nothing any Welshman ever done for her. And you can bank on that, Duke. She says to me, I'll always think of you as a gentleman, Mr. Wilson. I wasn't on to what that Welshman told her then. I didn't know the straight of it, till she wrote and told me, after she got to Wyoming. It's too bad, old feller. Wasn't it hell? I was so sore when she wrote, the way she'd believed that little sawed-off snorter with rock dust in his hair. I never answered that letter for a long time. Well, I got another letter from her about a year after that. She was still in the same place doing well, and her name was Nettie Morrison. Maybe it is yet, Tetherleg. Maybe I've been to thinking I'll go out there and look her up. And if she ain't married, me and her might let bygones be guy-gones and hitch. I could open an oyster parlor out there on the door I've saved up. I'd dish him up, and she'd wait on the table and take in the money. We'd do well, Duke. I bet you would. I got the last letter she wrote. I'll let you see it, Duke. Tetherleg made a rummaging in the chuck-wagon coming out presently with the letter. He stood contemplating it with tender eye. Some writer ain't she, Duke? She sure is a fine writer, Tetherleg, writes like a school marm. She can talk like one, too. See, land or y-o. That's a little town about as big as my hat from the looks of it on the map, standing away off up there alone. I could go in it with my eyes shut, straight as a bee. Why don't you write to her, Tetherleg? The Duke could scarcely keep back a smile. So diverting he found this affair of the Welshman, the waitress, and the cook. More comity than romance, he thought. Tetherleg on one side of the fence, that girl on the other. Ah, better squaring off to write, Tetherleg repired. But I don't seem to get the time. He opened his vest to put the letter away close to his heart. Seemed that it might remind him of his intention and square him quite around to the task. But there was no pocket on the side covering his heart. Tetherleg put the letter next to his lung as the nearest approach to that sentimental portion of his anatomy, and sighed long and loud as he buttoned his garment. You said you'd put off going till tomorrow morning, Duke? Sure I will. I'll throw my things in a sack and be ready to hit the breeze with you after breakfast. I can write back to the boss for my time. Morning found them on the road together, the sun at their backs. Tetherleg was as brilliant as a hummingbird, even to his belt and scabbard, which had a great many silver tacks driven into them, repeating the letters LW in great characters and small. He said the letters were the initials of his name. Lawrence, the Duke ventured to inquire? Tetherleg looked round him with a great caution before answering, although they were at least fifteen miles from camp and further than that from the next human habitation. He lowered his voice rubbing his hand reflectively along the glittering ornaments of his belt. Lovelace, he said. Not a bad name? Ain't no name for a cook, Tetherleg said almost vindictively. You're the first man ever told it to, and I'll ask you not to pass it on. I used to go by the name of Larry before they called me Tetherleg. Got that name out here in the Badlands. Since me, all right. It's a queer kind of a name to call a man by. How did they come to give it to you? Well, sir, I give myself that name, you might say, when you come to figure it down to cases. I was breaking a horse when I first come out here four years ago, heading at that time for Wyoming. He throwed me. When I didn't hop him again, the boys come over to see if I was busted. When they ask me if I was heard, I says, snap my darn old leg like a tater. And from that day on they call me Tetherleg. Yes, and I guess I'd have been in Wyoming now, maybe with an oyster parlor and a wife. If it hadn't been for that blame horse, paused reminiscently then he said, Where was you aiming to camp tonight, Duke? Where does the flyer stop after it passes misery going west? Stops for water at Glendora about fifty or fifty-five miles west. Sometimes I heard him say if a fellow buys a ticket for there in Chicago, it'll let him off, but I don't guess it stops their regular. Why, Duke, was you aiming to take the flyer there? No, we'll stop there tonight then, if your horse can make it. Make it! If he can't, I'll eat him raw. He's made seventy-five many a time before today. So they fared on that first day in friendly converse. At sunset they drew up on a mesa high above the treeless, broken country, through which they had been riding all day, and saw Glendora in the valley below them. There she is, said Taylorleg. I wonder what we're going to run into down there. End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Of the Duke of Chimney Bute This loop of watch recording is in the public domain. The Duke of Chimney Bute by G. W. Ogden Chapter 6 Allurements of Glendora In a bend of the little Missouri where it broadened out and took on the appearance of a consequential stream, Glendorily, a lonely little village, with a gray hill behind it. There was but half a street in Glendora like a setting for a stage, the railroad in the foreground, the little sun-baked station crouching by it, lonely as the winds which sung by night and the telegraph wires crossing its roof. Here the trains went by with a roar, leaving behind them a cloud of gray dust, like a curtain to hide from the eyes of those who strained from their windows to see the little that remained of Glendora. Once a place of more consequence than today, only enough remained of the town to live by its trade. There was enough flour in the store, enough whiskey in the saloon, enough stamps in the post office, enough beds in the hotel to satisfy with comfort the demands of the far stretching population of the country contiguous thereto. But if there had risen an extraordinary occasion, bringing a demand without notice for a thousand pounds more flour, a barrel of more whiskey, a hundred more stamps or five extra beds, Glendora would have fallen under the burden and collapsed in disgrace. Close by the station there were cattle pens for loading stock, with too long tracks for holding the cars. In autumn fat cattle were driven down out of the hidden valleys to entrain there for market. In those days there was merriment after nightfall in Glendora. At other times it was mainly a quiet place, the shooting that was done on its one-sided street, being of a peaceful nature, in the way of expressing a feeling for which some plain-witted drunken collider had no words. A good many years before the day that the Duke and Taterlig came riding into Glendora the town had supported more than one store and saloon. The shells of these dead enterprises stood there still, windows and doors boarded up, as if their owners had stopped their mouths when they went away to prevent a whisper of the secrets that might tell of the old riotous nights, or of fallen hopes or dishonest transactions. So they stood now, and their melancholy backs against the gray hill, giving to Glendora the appearance of a town that was more than half dead and soon must fail and pass utterly away in the gray, blowing clouds of dust. The hotel seemed the brightest and soundest living spot in the place, for it was painted in green, like a watermelon, with a cottonwood tree growing beside the pump at the porch corner. In yellow letters upon the windowpane of the office there appeared the proprietor's name, doubtless the work of some wandering artist who had paid the price of his lodging or his dinner-soul. Orson Wood, proprietor, said to sign, bedded in curly cues and twisted ornaments, as if a carpenter had plained the letters out of a board, leaving the shavings where they fell. A green rustic bench stood across one end of the long porch, such as is seen in boarding houses frequented by railroadmen and chairs with whittled and notched arms before the office door near the pump. Into this atmosphere there had come many years before one of those innocents among men whose misfortune it is to fall before the beguiless of the dishonest, that sort of man whom the promoters of schemes go out to catch in the manner of an old maid trapping flies in a cup of suds. Milton Philbrook was this man. Somebody had sold him forty thousand acres of land in a body for three dollars an acre. It began at the river and ran back to the hills for a matter of twenty miles. Philbrook bought the land on the showing which it was rich in coal deposits. Which was true enough. But he was not geologist enough to know that it was only lignite and not a coal of commercial value in those times. The truth he came to later together with the knowledge that his land was worth at the most extravagant valuation not more than fifty cents an acre. Finding no market for his brown coal, Philbrook decided to adopt the custom of the country and turn catamon. A little inquiry into the business convinced him that the expenses of growing the cattle and a long distance from market absorbed a great bulk of the profits needlessly. He said about with the original plan, therefore of fencing his forty thousand acres with wires, thus erasing at one bold stroke the cost of hiring men to guard his herds. A fence in the badlands was unknown outside a corral in those days. When carloads of barbed wire and posts began to arrive at Glendora, men came riding in for miles to satisfy themselves that the rumors were founded. When Philbrook hired men to build the fence and operations were begun, murmurs and threats against the unwelcome innovation were heard. Philbrook poised the word to conclusion, unmindful of the threats, moved now by the intention of founding a great baronial estate in that bleak land. His further plan of profit and consequence was to establish a packing house at Glendora, where his herds could be slaughtered and dressed and shipped neat to market, at once assuring him a double profit and reduced expense. But that was one phase of his dream that never hardened into the reality of machinery and bricks. While the long lines of fence were going up, carpenters were at work building a fit seat for Philbrook's baronial aims. The point he chose for his home site was the top of a bare plateau overlooking the river. The face of it gray, crumbling shale, rising three hundred feet in abrupt slope from the water's edge. At great labor and expense Philbrook built a road between Glendora and this place, and carried water and pipes from the river to irrigate the grass, trees, shrubs, and blooming plants alien to that country, which he planted to break the bleakness of it and make a setting for his costly home. Here on this jutting shoulder of cold, unfriendly upland, a house rose which was the wonder of all who beheld it, as they rode the wild distances and feud it from afar. It seemed a mansion to them, its walls gleaming white, its roof green as the hope of its builder's breast. It was a large house, and seemed larger for its prominence against the sky, built in the shape of an tea, with wide porches in the angles, and to this place upon which he had lavished what remained of his fortune, Philbrook brought his wife and little daughter, as strange as their surroundings as the delicate flowers which pined and drooped in the unfriendly soil. Immediately upon completion of his fences, he had imported well-bred cattle and set them grazing within his confines. He set men to riding by night and day a patrol of his long lines of wire, rifles under their thighs, with orders to shoot anybody found cutting the fence in accordance with the many threats to serve them so. Contensions and feuds began, and battles and bloody encounters, which did not cease through many a turbulent year. Philbrook lived in the saddle, for he was a man of high courage and unbending determination, leaving his wife and child in the suspense and solitude of their grand home in which they found no pleasure. The trees and shrubs which Philbrook had planted, with such care and attended with such hope, withered on the bleak plateau and died in spite of the water from the river, the delicate grass with which he sought to beautify and clothe the harsh gray soil sickened and pined away. The shrubs made a short battle against the bleakness of winter, putting out pale, strange flowers like the wand's smile of a woman, who stands on the threshold of death, then veiled away, and died. Mrs. Philbrook broke under the strain of never-ending battles, and died the spring that her daughter came eighteen years of age. The girl had grown up in the saddle, a true daughter of her fighting sire. Time and again she had led a patrol of two fence riders along one side of the sixty square miles of ranch, while her father guarded the other. She could handle firearms with speed and accuracy equal to any man on the ranch, where she had been bearing a man's burden since her early girlhood. All this information pertaining to the history of Milton Philbrook and his adventures in the Bad Lands, Orson Wood, the one armed landlord at the hotel in Glendora, told Lambert on the evening of the traveller's arrival there. The story had come as the result of questions concerning the great White House on the Mesa, the two men sitting on a porch in plain view of it. Tater Lake, entertaining the daughter of the hotel across the showcase, in hit the office. Lambert found the story more interesting than anything he had imagined of the Bad Lands. Here was romance, looking down on him from the lonely walls of the White House, and heroism of finer kind. Then these people appreciated. He was sure. Is the girl still here, he inquired? Yeah, she's back now. She's been away to school in Boston for three or four years, coming back in summer for a little while. When did she come back? Lambert felt that his voice was thick as he inquired, disturbed by the eager beating of his heart, who knows, and perhaps, and all the rest of it came galloping to him with a roar of blood in his ears like the sound of a thousand hoofs. The landlord called a re-shoulder to his daughter. Alta, when did Vista Philbrook come back? Four or five weeks ago, said Alta with a sound of chewing gum. Four or five weeks ago the landlord repeated as though Alta spoke of foreign tongue and must be translated. I see, said Lambert vaguely, shaking to the tips of his fingers with a kind of buck-og, that he never had suffered from before. He was afraid the landlord would notice it, and slew his chair, getting out his tobacco to cover the fool's spell. For that was she. Vista Philbrook was she. And she was Vista Philbrook. He knew it as well as he knew that he could count ten. Something that had led him there that day, the force that was shaping the course of their two lives to cross again had held him back when he had considered selling his horse and going west a long distance on the train. He grew calmer when he had the cigarette lit. The landlord was talking again. Funny thing about Vista coming home, too, he said, and stopped a little as if to consider the humor of it. Lambert looked at him with a sudden wretch of the neck which. Philbrook's luck held out. It looked like till she got through her education, all through the fights he had in the scrapes he ran in the last ten years. He never got a scratch. Bullets used to hum around that man like bees, and he'd ride through them like there was bees. But none of them ever notched him. Curious, wasn't it? Did somebody get him at last? No. Took typhoid fever. Went down about a week or ten days after Vista got home. Died after a couple weeks ago. Vista had him laid beside her mother up there on the hill. He said they'd never run him out of this country, living or dead. Lambert swallowed a dry lump. Is she running ranch? Like an old soldier, sir, I'll tell you. I've got a whole lot of admiration for that girl. She must have her hands full. Night and day. She's shored on fence riders, and I guess if you boys are looking for a job, you can land up there with Vista all right. Tater leg. And a girl came out and sat on the green rustic bench at the further end of the porch. It complained under them. There was talk and low giggling. We didn't expect to strike anything this soon, Lambert said, his active mind leaping ahead to shape new romance like a magician. He don't look like the kind of boys that had shy from a job if it jumped out of the road ahead of you. I'd hate for folks to think we would. Ain't you the fellow they call the Duke of Chimney Butte? They call me that in this country. Yes, I knew that horse the minute you rode up, though he's changed for the better, wonderful since I saw him last. And I knew you from the description. I'm heard of you. Vista'd give you a job in a minute, and she'd pay you good money, too. I wouldn't wonder if she didn't put you in as foreman, right on the jump, account of the name you got up there in the badly. Not much to my credit in the name, I'm afraid, said Lambert, almost sadly. Do they still cut her fences and run off her stock? Yep, Russell's got to be stylish around here again after we thought we had all them gangs rounded up and sent to the pen. I guess some of their time must be up and they're coming home. It's pretty tough for a single-handed girl. Yep, it's tough. Them fellers are more than likely some of the old crowd Philbrook used to fight and round up and send over the road. He killed off four or five of them, and the rest of them swore they'd salt him when they'd done with their time. Well, he's gone. But they're not above fighting a girl. It's a tough job for a woman, said Lambert, looking thoughtfully toward the White House on the mesa. Ain't it though? Lambert thought about it a while or appeared to be thinking about it, sitting with bent heads, smoking silently, looking now and then toward the ranch house, the lights of which could be seen. Alta came across the forest, presently, tater leg attending her like a courtier. She dismissed him at the door with an excuse of deferred duties within. He joined his thoughtful partner. Better we're up and see her in the morning, suggested Wood the landlord. Like a will, thank you. Wood went to sell a cowboy cigar the partner started out to have a look at Glendora by moonlight. A little way they walked in silence, the light of the barbershop falling across the road ahead of them. See who in the morning, Duke? Tater leg inquired. Lady in the White House, on the mesa, her father died a few weeks ago and left her alone with a big ranch on her hands. Rustlers are running her cattle off, cutting her fences. Fences? Yes, forty thousand acres all fenced in, like Texas. You don't tell me. Needs men, Wood says, I thought maybe. The Duke didn't finish it, just left it swinging that way, expecting Tater leg to read the rest. Sure, said Tater leg. Taking it right along. I wouldn't mind staying around here for a while. Glendora's a nice little place, nicer place than I thought it was. The Duke said nothing but as they went on toward the barbershop. He grinned. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Of The Duke of Chimney Butte This little revox recording is in the public domain. The Duke of Chimney Butte by G. W. Ogden Chapter 7 The Homeliest Man That brilliant beam falling through the barbers open door, an uncurtained window came from a new lighting device procured from a Chicago mail-order house. It was a gasoline lamp that burned with a gas mantle, swinging from the ceiling flooding the little shop with a greenish light. It gave a ghastly hue of death to the human face, but it would light up the creases and wrinkles of the most weathered neck that came under the barbers' blade. That was the main consideration, for most of the barbers' work was done at night, that trade or profession, as those who pursue it unfailingly hold it to be, being a sideline in connection with his duties as station agent. He was a progressive citizen, and no grass grew under his feet, no hair under his hand. At the moment the Duke and Tater Lake entered the barbers' far-reaching beam. Some buck of the range was stretched in a chair. The customer was a man of considerable length and many angles, a shorn appearance about his face, especially his big bony nose, that seemed to tell of a moustache sacrificed in the operation, then drawing to a close. Tater Lake stopped short at sight of the legs drawn up like a sharp gable, to get all of them into the chair. The immense nose raking the ceiling like a double-barreled cannon. The morgue tended light, giving him the complexion of a man ready for his shroud. He touched Lambert's arm to check him and call his attention. Look in there. Look at that, fellow Duke. There he is. There's the man I've been looking for ever since I was old enough to vote. I don't believe there was any such a fellow, but there he is. What fellow? Who is he? The fellow that's uglier than me. Dang, his melts. There he is. I'm going to ask him for his picture, so I'll have proof to show. Tater Lake was at an unaccountable pitch of spirits. Adventure had taken hold of him like liquor. He made a start and for the door, as if to carry out his expressed intention in all earnestness. Lambert stopped him. He might not see the joke, Tater Lake. He couldn't refuse a man a friendly turn like that, Duke. Look at him. What's that fellow rubbing on him, do you reckon? Ointment of some kind, I guess. Tater Lake stood with his bow legs so wide apart that a barrel could have been pitched between them, watching the operation within the shop with the greatest enjoyment. Goose greased with perfume. And that cut your breath. Look at that fellow shut his eyes and stretch his darned old neck, just like a calf, when you rub him under the chin. Look at him. Did you ever see anything to match it? Come on, let the man alone. Wrinkle remover, beauty-restorer, said Tater Lake, not moving forward an inch upon his way while he seemed to be struck with admiration for the process of renovation. There was an unmistakable jeer in his tone, which the barber resented by a fierce look. You're going to get into trouble if you don't shut up, Lambert cautioned. Look at him shut his old eyes and stretch his neck. Ain't it the sweetest? The man in the chair lifted himself in sudden grimness, sat up from between the barber's massaging hands, which still held their pose like some sort of brace, turned a threatening look into the road. If half of his face was sufficient to raise the declaration from Tater Lake that the man was uglier than he, all of it surely proclaimed him the homeliest man in the nation. His eyes were red as from some long carousel, their lids heavy and slow, his neck was long and inflamed, like an old gobbler's when he inflates himself with his impotent rage. He looked hard at the two men, so sour in his wrath, so comical in his unmatched ugliness that Lambert could not restrain a most unusual and generous grin. Tater Lake bared his head, bowing low, not a smile, not a ripple of a smile on his face. Mr., I take my hat off to you, he said. Yes, and I'll take your full head off the first time I meet you, the man returned. He let himself back into the barber's waiting hands, a growl deep in him, surly as an old dog that had been roused out of his place in the middle of the road. General, I wouldn't hurt you for a purdy. I wouldn't change your luxe for a dollar bill, said Tater Lake. Wait till I get out of this chair, the customer threatened voice smothered in the barber's hands. I guess he's not a dangerous man, lucky for you, said Lambert. He drew Tater Lake away and went on. The allurements of Glendora were no more dazzling by night than by day. There was not much business in this loon there being few visitors in town, no roistering, no sounds of uncurbed gaiety. Formerly there had been a dance hall in connection with the saloon, but that branch of the business had failed through lack of patronage long ago. The bar stood in the front of the long cheerless room, a patch of light over and around it, the melancholy furniture of its prosperous days dim in the gloom beyond. Lambert and Tater Lake had a few drinks to show the respect for the institutions of the country and went back to the hotel. Somebody had taken Tater Lake's place besides Alta on the green branch. It was a man who spoke with rumbling voice, like the sound of an empty wagon on a rocky road. Lambert recognized the intonation at once. Looks to me like there's trouble ahead for you, Mr. Wilson, he said. I'll take that fellow by the handle on his face and bust him again a tree like a gourd, Tater Lake said, not in a boasting manner, but in an even, unperturbed way of a man stating a fact. If there was any tree, I'll slime again a rock, I'll bust him like an oyster. I think we'd better go to bed without a fight if we can. I'm willing, but I'm not going around by the back door to miss that fellow. They came up the porch into the light that fell weakly from the office down the steps. There was a movement of feet beside the green bench and exclamation, a swift advance on the part of the big-nosed man who had afforded amusement for Tater Lake in the barber's chair. You little bench-leg fisty. If you've got gall enough to say one word to a man's face, say it, he challenged. Alta came after him quickly, with Pacific intent. She was a tall girl, not very well filled out, like an immature bean pod. Her heavy black hair was cut in waterfall of bangs, which came down to her eyebrows. The rest of it, done up behind in loops, like sausages, and fastened with large red ribbon. She had put off the apron and stood forth in white, her sleeves much shorter than the arms which reached out of them, rings on her fingers, which looked as if they would leave their shadows behind. Now, Mr. Jellick, I don't want you to go raising no fuss around here with the guests, she said. Jellick, repeated Tater Lake, turning to Lambert, with a pained, depressed look on his face. It sounds like something you've blowed to make a noise. The barber's customer was a taller man standing than he was long lying. There wasn't much clearance between his head and the ceiling of the porch. He stood before Tater Lake, blowing his hat off, his short cut hair glistening with palmitin, showing his teeth like a vicious horse. You look like you was cut out with a can opener, he sneered. Maybe I was, and I've got rough edges on me, Tater Lake returned, looking at him with a calculative eye. Now, Mr. Jellick, a hand on his arm but confidence of the force of it, like a lady-animal trainer in a cage of lions, you come over here and sit down and leave that gentleman alone. If anybody but you to set it out I'd have told him he was a liar, Jellick growled. He moved his foot to go with her, stopped, snarled at Tater Lake again. I used a rollamon flower and swallow him with feathers on, he said. You're a terrible rough fellow, ain't you, Tater Lake inquired, with cutting sarcasm. Alta led Jellick off to his corner. Tater Lake and Lambert entered the hotel office. Gee, but this is a windy night, said the Duke holding his hat on with both hands. I'll let some wind out at him if he monkeys with me. Looks to me like I know another fellow that an operation wouldn't hurt, the Duke remarked, turning a sly eye on his friend. The landlord appeared with a lamp to light them to their beds, putting an end to these exchanges of threat and banter, as he was leaving them to their double barrel department. Lambert remarked, That man, Jellick. Interesting looking fellow. Ben, Jellick? Yes, Ben's a case, he's quite a case. What business does he follow? Ben? Ben's cook at Pat Sullivan's ranch up the river, one of the best camp cooks in the Badlands, and I guess the best known without any doubt. Tater Lake sat down on the side of his bed as if he had been punctured, indeed, lopping forward in mock attitude of utter collapse as the landlord closed the door. Cook, that settles it for me. I've turned the last flapjack I'll ever turn for any man but myself. How will you manage the oyster-potter? Well, I've just about give up on the notion, Duke. I've been thinking I'll stick to the range and going to sheep business. I expect it would be a good move, old fellow. You're going into it around here, now tell me. Elsa tells you. Oh, you get out, but I'm a cowman now, and I'm going to stay one for some time to come. It don't take much intelligence in a man to write fence. No, I guess we could both pass on that. The Duke blew the lamp out with his hat. There was silence, all but the scuffling sound of disrobing. Tatterleague spoke out of bed. That girl's got pretty eyes, ain't she? Lovely eyes, Tatterleague. Pretty hair, too. Makes a fellow want to lean over and pat that little roll of bangs. I expect there's a fellow down there doing it now. The spring complained under Tatterleague's sudden movement. There was a sound of swishing legs under the sheet. Lambert saw him dimly against the window, sitting with his feet on the floor. You mean Jedleague? Why not Jedleague? He's got the field to himself. Tatterleague sat a little while thinking about it. Presently he resumed his repose, chuckling a choppy little laugh. Jedleague. Jedleague. Ain't got no more of a show than a cow. When a lady steps in and takes a man's part, there's only one answer. Duke. And she called me a gentleman, too. Didn't you hear or call me a gentleman, Duke? I seem to remember that somebody else called you that one time. Tatterleague didn't reply at once. Lambert lay there grinning in the dark. No matter how sincere Tatterleague might have been in this or any other affair to the Duke. It was only a joke. That was the attitude of most men toward the tender figurities of others. No romance ever is serious but one's own. Well, that happened a good while ago, said Tatterleague defensively. But memories didn't trouble him much that night. Very soon he was sleeping, snoring on the G-string with unsparing pressure. For Lambert there was no sleep. He lay in a fever of anticipation. Tomorrow he should sear. His quest ended almost as soon as begun. There was not one stick of fuel for the flame of his conjecture. Not one reasonable justification for his more than hope. Only something had flashed to him that the girl, in the house, on the mesa, was she whom his soul sought, whose hacker chief was folded in his pocketbook and carried with his money. He would take no counsel from reason, no denial from fate. He lay awake, seeing visions when he should have been asleep in the midst of legitimate dreams. A score of plans for serving her came up for examination. A hundred hopes for a happy accumulation of this green romance but it bloomed fell. But above the race of his hot thoughts the certainty persisted that this girl was the lady of the beckoning hand. He had no desire to escape from these feats or advancees in sleep, as his companion had put down his homely ambitions. Long he lay awake, turning them to view from every hopeful alluring angle, hearing the small noises of the town's small activities die away to silence and peace. In the morning he should ride to see her, his quest happy, and to dindeed, even on the threshold of its beginning.