310 MY SPORTING HOLIDAYS 



This was particularly the case in certain crimes, 

 such as horse-stealing, for example. A horse-thief, 

 when caught, always met in earlier days with swift 

 and certain death, mainly because a man out West 

 without his horse was only half a man, deprived, 

 possibly, of his only valuable asset and his best means 

 of locomotion, and the crime was easy and attractive 

 in the absence of some strong deterrent. The stolen 

 horse itself supplied the best means of escape. So 

 the hand of every man with anything to lose was 

 against the horse-thief. 



Remembering this, it is easier for the stay-at- 

 home, town-living eastern folk to realize the full 

 pungency and satire of the Republican orator's re- 

 mark on one occasion to an appreciative Wyoming 

 audience : ' I am not prepared to say that every 

 democrat is a horse-thief, but I am prepared un- 

 hesitatingly to affirm that every horse-thief is a 

 democrat.' 



Hanging was the appropriate punishment decreed 

 by Judge Lynch for this species of western wrong- 

 doer, and it was at one time common testimony to 

 the invigorating and salubrious air of northern 

 Colorado that horse-thieves required to be hung, in 

 this particularly health-giving climate, for five minutes 

 longer than anywhere else. 



There was another species of criminal namely, the 

 train-robber or ' road-agent ' who usually met with 

 short shrift when caught. 



Early in the 'eighties I was travelling to Rawlins 

 in Wyoming, for the double purpose of looking after 

 the affairs of a cattle-ranch I was then interested in, 

 and also of enjoying some wild sport on the Main 

 Divide. At Cheyenne, on the Wyoming border, I 



