96 



RANCH LIFE AND THE HUNTING-TRAIL 



be s/aycr tJic ball, saying', " Here, man, here 's the bullet," It had glanced 

 along- his breast-bone, gone into the body, and come out at the point of 

 the shoulder, when, being spent, it dropped down the sleeve into his hand. 

 Next day the local paper, which rejoiced in the title of "The Bad 

 Lands Cowboy," chronicled the event in the usual vague way as an 

 "unfortunate occurrence" between "two of our most esteemed fellow- 

 citizens." The editor was a good fellow, a college graduate, and a first- 

 class base-ball player, who always stood stoutly up against any corrupt 

 dealing ; but, like all other editors in small Western towns, he was intimate 

 with both combatants in almost every fight. 



The winter after this occurrence I was away, and on my return began 

 asking my foreman — a particular crony of mine — about the fates of my 

 various friends. Among others I inquired after a traveling preacher who 

 had come to our neighborhood ; a good man, but irascible. After a mo- 

 ment's pause a gleam of remembrance came into my informant's eye: "Oh, 

 the parson ! Well — he beat a man over the head with an ax, and they 

 put him in jail ! " It certainly seemed a rather summary method of re- 

 pressing a refractory parishioner. Another acquaintance had shared a like 

 doom. " He started to go out of the country, but they ketched him at 

 Bismarck and put him in jail" — apparently on general principles, for I did 

 not hear of his having committed any specific crime. My foreman some- 

 times developed his own theories of propriety. I remember his objecting 

 strenuously to a proposal to lynch a certain French-Canadian who had 

 lived in his own cabin, back from the river, ever since the whites came into 

 the land, but wdio was suspected of being a horse-thief. His chief point 

 against the proposal was, not that the man was innocent, but that "it did 

 n't seem anyways right to hang a man who had been so long in the 

 country." 



Sometimes we had a comic row. There was one huge man from Mis- 

 souri called "The Pike," wdio had been the keeper of a wood-yard for 

 steamboats on the Upper Missouri. Like most of his class he was a 

 hard case, and, though pleasant enough when sober, always insisted on 

 fighting when drunk. One day, when on a spree, he announced his 

 intention of thrashing the entire population of Medora seriatim, and 

 began to make his promise good with great vigor and praiseworthy 

 impartiality. He was victorious over the first two or three eminent citi- 

 zens whom he encountered, and then tackled a gentleman known as "Cold 

 Turkey Bill." Under ordinary circumstances Cold Turkey, though an 

 able-bodied man. was no match for The Pike ; but the latter was still 

 rather drunk, and moreover was wearied by his previous combats. So 

 Cold Turkey got him down, lay on him. choked him by the throat with 



