It was in the earlier days of autumn. Summer had gone, and there was already a crisp sentiment of coming cold in the air. The Old Cattleman and I had given way to a taste for pedestrianism that had lain dormant through the hot months. It was at the close of our walk, and we […]

“And so you think the trouble lies with the man and not with the whiskey?” I said. The Old Cattleman and I were discussing “temperance.” “Right you be. This yere whiskey-drinkin’,” continued the old gentleman as he toyed with his empty glass, “is a mighty cur’ous play. I knows gents as can tamper with their […]

“Don’t I never tell you the story of the death of Crawfish Jim?” The Old Cattleman bent upon me an eye of benevolent inquiry. I assured him that the details of the taking off of Crawfish Jim were as a sealed book to me. But I would blithely listen. “What was the fate of Crawfish […]

“This narrative is what you-all might call some widespread,” said the Old Cattleman, as he beamed upon me, evidently in the best of humors. “It tells how Pinon Bill gets a hoss on Jack Moore; leaves the camp bogged up to the saddle-girths in doubt about who downs Burke; an’ stakes the Deef Woman so […]

“It mebby is, that romances comes to pass on the range when I’m thar,” remarked the Old Cattleman, meditatively, “but if so be, I never notes ’em. They shorely gets plumb by me in the night.” The old gentleman had just thrown down a daily paper, and even as he spoke I read on the […]

“Now I thoroughly saveys,” remarked the Old Cattleman reflectively, at a crisis in our conversation when the talk turned on men of small and cowardly measure, “I thoroughly saveys that taste for battle that lurks in the deefiles of folk’s nacher like a wolf in the hills Which I reckons now that I, myse’f, is […]