not Johnny any more to me.

The day following-the day of the round-up, that is-was an awful one, such as they rarely have in the Panhandle; the mercury was above a hundred, the sun blistering, and the wind, which is ordinarily the saving angel of that country, hot and dry.

Our party consisted of Viola and Mr. Dement in a buggy, and Cousin Milton and I on horseback. Cousin Milton and I went along gaily, not giving a cent for the weather. I had been put on the best "cutting pony" on the ranch. Never had I ridden a thing with more delightful and varied gaits. We got to the place about twelve o'clock; the cattle were pretty well gathered in from the different pastures; the men had killed and prepared a beef, and were about to have dinner and do the cutting up, branding, etc., afterward.

be

I would recommend to the jaded palace and captious fancy that cannot pleased at Delmonico's, beef killed an hour since and fried in grease in a skillet, or broiled on a stick in the smoke and flames; café noir out of a tin cup, biscuits, butter and pickles. I offer this out of the fulness of my experience, as the most satisfactory, not to say luxurious meal imaginable, when eaten under the proper circumstances, and amid its legitimate surroundings.

After dinner Cousin Milton came over and asked if Johnny and I could find our way home alone. Viola, he stated, wished to go now, but his own sentiment was that I mustn't miss the roundup for that.

I replied that I was quite ready to go home, and entirely unwilling to inconvenience Mr. Dement.

Milton looked at me in some surprise and rejoined: "Why, Johnny wants to stay, of course. He says he gets something new out of every roundup he attends, and it's business with him."

"Oh!" I replied scornfully (Johnny had come within earshot now), "if it's anything that will advance Mr. Dement's work, of course I am pleased to remain.” Both men looked puzzled and distressed, and I felt like a naughty child. "Let me go over to the buckboard and get my other handkerchief," I said ir

ritably, "and then you may go."

As we walked to the buggy Cousin Milton remarked: "You've got so used to your ancient valetudinarian, Sis, that you don't know how to treat a real man."

It came over me with a flood of light that Cousin Milton was an ally, not an enemy. I wished I had known it sooner, but I hunted out my extra handkerchief, bade him and Viola good-bye in an unhappy frame of mind, and followed Johnny over to where the cowboys were "holding" the herd. There were two or three thousand cattle and ten or twelve men. Two of these were great viking looking fellows, tall, heavy, blackbearded, splendid men of forty; the rest slim, sinewy young chaps. Curiously enough, all that I happened to notice were blondes, with their eyes-and teeth, too, when they laughed-glaring whitely out of their deeply sun-burned faces.

The last stragglers were just being rounded in as we came up. Johnny drew his horse quietly to one side and sat there; but I, in misery and embarassment, went up and began riding round the herd casually, as the rest were doing, turning back any cattle that were disposed to bolt.

There was a continual bellowing and shaking of heads and horns, and an occasional break for the open plain. The horses were all alert and darting about to keep the cattle massed. Only the men seemed nonchalant and unconcerned. And there came a tickling in my muscles, a shortening of my breath, a quickening of my heart, a sort of glorious lightness in the top of my head.

I continued to ride around the bunch for a time, all the cowboys regarding me with serious approval, or with that well-bred unconsciousness which refrains from observing too closely for fear of causing embarrassment. When the cutting out began I was carried away with enthusiastic admiration. Such riding! Such skill and quickness, and address: It was a hand to hand struggle and a wild race with almost every animal, before it was finally landed in the outer bunch.

It was so stirring, so intensely interesting and exciting, that finally the im

pulse to take a hand became irresistible. Johnny was forgotten; my breath came in gasps; the blood jumped through my veins like quicksilver, and the noble recklessness in the top of my head flew all over me.

I had noticed that the boys cut out and placed in the separate bunch only the yearlings; and seeing a promising fellow of this class-a strawberry-roan muley-near me, I put my horse in quietly among the herd, cut him out, and started him toward the outer bunch. He escaped me, after a dozen hot turns, and regained the fringes of the herd, shaking his muley head and swearing in a hoarse

shot in between the herd and the calf, cut it out, and the fight began.

I was an ignorant tenderfoot, but the more important member of the partnership-Pinto-knew all about the handling of cattle. He was like a pony of India rubber and steel springs animated by an indomitable and debonnair spirit. He knew what the roan muley calf wished to do before the calf himself thoroughly realized it. He ran like a deer, leaped and dodged and tacked like a squirrel or a kitten. I verily believed that, in cattleman phrase, he could turn on a dollar," so close and instant was his wheel to right-about-face.

undertone. Rather hoping nobody had noticed my performance, I was preparing to rejoin the ranks of the herders as unostentatiously as possible, when one of the big, black-bearded men sheered his little cat of a pony in close to me and cried encouragingly: "You'll get him yet," waving his hand toward the calf.

I glanced toward Johnny. He was not looking at me. He had a note book out and was writing, resting the book on nis saddle pommel. I chose to think his attitude was one of reproach.

This was enough. I wheeled Pinto toward the herd, dug my left heel into him till he jumped like a kangaroo; we

Life was a roan yearling of diabolic swiftness and perverseness, fleeing between the level plain and the burning sky; and I was neither flesh nor bones, nor anything but a blind, consuming passion to outrun and outgeneral him, and land him in the bunch of yearlings.

No captive or condemned criminal of old Rome ever drove his fearful chariot race in the great hippodrome, for the prize of his own life ransomed from the lions or the executioner, in a finer ecstasy of rashness than that which inspired me to the chase of my roan calf; nor could he have heard-when at last he passed the goal a victor-the cheers of the fierce populace in a more utter swoon of triumph than that through which the hurrahs of the cowboys reached me, as I turned and left my yearling with the bunch of his kind.

I looked then for Johnny. He was away, quite over at the other end of the group apparently much interested in something one of the tall dark man was telling him. I turned resentfully to the cowboy who had constituted himself my mentor. "I am going to try again," I cried, as we started off.

Success is the most seductive of intoxicants, applause the keenest spur and excitant. I had cut out and gotten over to the yearling bunch, unassisted, three animals, had been helped with a fourth, and helped another fellow with a fifth, when Johnny rode up to me and mildly suggested that we would better be going. "You mustn't forget that you've got that nine miles to ride yet, through this heat. You'll be in bed to-morrow if I don't take you home right away," he said.

The thought of that nine mile ride with Johnny-no, with Mr. Dement, I should have been keen enough to go with Johnny-appalled me.

I became suddenly aware that I was aching from head to foot. I felt an absurd impulse to weep. I longed to be three years old that I might wail for some one to "take" me.

So I went meekly. Our way was almost due south; it was three o'clock; the sun was at its hottest, the wind the very breath of Tophet, and so fierce that it nearly knocked us off our horses. It scorched our nostrils, and fairly snatched

the breath from them. I couldn't hear Johnny's voice two feet from my ear. I fully realized then that I had a body, and that it was a good deal knocked about. When I tried to move and change my position in the saddle a little, the nervous and apprehensive Pinto, who seemed to cherish a misanthropie distrust of the "female sect," jumped forward, unshipping my cap, just as a faw of wind caught under its visor, popped the pins like small fireworks, and carried the cap itself about a quarter of a mile back.

"Kate," said Johnny, as he brought my evasive headgear back, "let's be friends to-day. I am going away tomorrow."

Words were out of the question, so I merely nodded. I realized that if Johnny were going away I might almost as well be at home as at Cousin Milton's.

"I want to talk to you as we used to," he said, wistfully, "and it's only one time you know, dear. That's surely not much to ask."

"No," I answered, half under my breath, "it is not much."

"I want to show you the letter from my publishers," he went on, as he got out and handed me the folded note.

"My book is selling at the rate of two thousand a month, and the new book, this Texas book, is being called for right along. I must get back home and to work."

"I am very glad," I said. "I congratulate you." And there I stopped; I could not trust my voice further.

So, after the promise of being good friends, we rode one whole miserable mile in unfriendly silence.

"Kate," began Johnny, "I did not intend to say one word on the subject, but I am going to ask you, what-what is he like, this man you are going to marry?"

"I don't know," I answered truthfully. "Is he a Texan?"

"I don't know," I replied again.

"Don't know," echoed Johnny, in sur prise; "don't know whether the man you are going to marry is a Texan or not?"

"No, I don't," I maintained steadily. "I don't know anything about the man I

T

HANKS to railroads and other civilizers there is a striking decadence of a certain frontier product known as the "cowboy;" and in the course of a few more years this picturesque character will have become extinct. He first became known in Texas in the early '60s, and flourished until the end of the '90s, of the past century. Then he began to rapidly pass away; as law and order, church and school, and the other advance agencies of the overwhelming approach of civilization and power of empire gradually but aggressively appeared and permanently remained.

Not all the cowboys were so extremely lawless and murderous as sometimes delineated and always believed to be. But the masses of them were owners or herders of stock upon unpurchased or unpaid for ranges of nutritious grasses in the western part of the United States and a majority of them were stealers of horses and cattle, guzzlers of adulterated spirits, terrors of town and plain, and shooters of men; and it may have been said of them, with perfect truthfulness, that they feared neither God nor man. At the zenith of their distinction and numbers, (anywhere in the '80s, say) they roamed over a country lying between the twenty-ninth and forty-seventh parallels of latitude and between meridians of longitude twenty-two and thirty-eight, and were most numerously and lawlessly found in Montana, Arizona and New Mexico, although they were by no means scarce in Texas, Kansas and Colorado.

As a general thing the cowboy who showed up at the cattle stations along the Southern Pacific, Texas Pacific, Santa

Fe and Union Pacific railroads, twen.y years ago, as the one daily train arrived from either point of compass, was an Apollo Belvidere in physical shape and beauty; he wore a blue flannel shirt and flaming red necktie, dark trousers stuck into high-legged kip boots, and sombrero. He carried a wicked knife in a bootleg and one or more revolvers at his waist. His arms and ammunition were always kept in perfect order and he was the most accomplished shot in the world, as his "code" was to always go "well heeled" and never let an enemy "get the drop" on him. He was a matchless rider, and could often be seen before the completion of the far southwestern railways tearing through the chapparal like a demon alongside of a fast-running train, whooping like a Comanche, and sending harmless bullets through the headlight of a locomotive.

He was at once generous, lawless, dissipated, desperate, dangerous; and he dashed furiously forward through the picturesque hell upon earth of his own creation, like a fantastic devil, to nis grave.

After having seen a good deal of him for ten or twelve years in New Mexico and Arizona, I concluded that, when he did not draw his first ingenuous breath in the broad domain of Texas, his tentative inspirations were compounded of the exquisite atmosphere of Pike County, Missouri. On his native heath, especially if his countenance was ferocious and vil lainous, he was an awe inspiring creature. You felt like giving him a wide berthlike walking around him, as it were. By no means do I wish to insinuate that the cowboys, as a class, had bad faces. The