88 RAXCH LIFE AND THE HUNTING -TRAIL 



twenty-ibur hours ; but. lying by the carcass for two or three days, they 

 recovered strength. A week afterwards the trapper reached a miner's 

 cabin in safety. There he told his tale, and the unknown man who 

 alone might possibly have contradicted it lay dead in the depths of the 

 wolf-haunted forest. 



The cowboys, who have supplanted these old hunters and trappers as 

 the typical men of the plains, themselves lead lives that are almost as full 

 oi hardship and adventure. The unbearable cold of winter sometimes 

 makes the small outlying camps fairly uninhabitable if fuel runs short ; 

 and if the line riders are caught in a blizzard while making their way to 

 the home ranch, they are lucky if they get off with nothing worse than 

 frozen feet and faces. 



They are, in the main, hard-working, faithful fellows, but of course are 

 frequently obliged to get into scrapes through no fault of their own. 

 Once, while out on a wagon trip, I got caught while camped by a spring 

 on the prairie, through my horses all straying. A few miles off was the 

 camp of two cowboys, who were riding the line for a great Southern 

 cow-outfit. I did not even know their names, but happening to pass by 

 them I told of my loss, and the day after they turned up with the missing 

 horses, which they had been hunting for twenty- four hours. All I could 

 do in return was to give them some reading matter — something for which 

 the men in these lonely camps are always grateful. Afterwards I spent a 

 day or two with my new friends, and we became quite intimate. They 

 were Texans. Both were quiet, clean-cut, pleasant-spoken young fellows, 

 who did not even swear, except under great provocation, — and there can 

 be no greater provocation than is given by a " mean " horse or a refractory 

 steer. Yet, to my surprise, I found that they were, in a certain sense, 

 fugitives from justice. They were complaining of the extreme severity of 

 the winter weather, and mentioned their longing to go back to the South. 

 The reason they could not was that the summer before they had taken 

 part in a small civil war in one of the wilder counties of New Mexico. It 

 had originated in a quarrel between two great ranches over their respect- 

 ive water rights and range rights, — a quarrel of a kind rife among pastoral 

 peoples since the days when the herdsmen of Lot and Abraham strove 

 together for the grazing lands round the mouth of the Jordan. There 

 were collisions between bands of armed cowboys, the cattle were harried 

 from the springs, outlying camps were burned down, and the sons of the 

 rival owners fought each other to the death with bowie-knife and revol- 

 ver when they met at the drinking-booths of the squalid towns. Soon 

 the smoldering jealousy which is ever existent between the Americans 

 and Mexicans of the frontier was aroused, and when the original cause 



