swept the land like a contagion.  Unique in the history of man’s development was this the era of the cowboy, as fantastic now as the era of the red peril, its predecessor; yet vital, bizarre, throbbing, unconsciously human, as no other period has ever been, as in all probability none will ever be again.  Generous, spendthrift, murderous when crossed, chivalrous, fearless, profane, yet fundamentally religious, inebriate, wilful and docile by turns, ceaselessly active, eternally discontented, seeking they knew not what, they were their own evil genius; as certainly as nature surrounded them with Heaven, they supplied their own Hell and, impartial, chose from each to weave the web of their lives.

Of this period, life of this life, was Colonel William Landor; colonel no longer, plain Bill, from the river to the Hills, husband these ten years now, but not father, Cattle King of an uncontested range.  Of this life likewise, bred in it, saturated in it, was a dark young woman, his adopted daughter, two years past her majority, Elizabeth Rowland Landor by name.  Of it most vitally of all, born of it, rooted in it through unknown centuries of ancestral domicile, was a copper-brown young man, destitute as a boy of twelve of a trace of beard, black as a prairie crow of hair and eyes, deep-lunged like a race-track thoroughbred, wiry as a mustang, garbed as a white man, but bearing the liquid name of a Teton Sioux, “Ma-wa-cha-sa, the lost pappoose,” yet known wherever the Santee Massacre and the tale of his appearance was known, as “How” Landor.  Of this period, last of all, was the great B.B.—­Buffalo Butte—­ranch, giant among the giants, whose brand was familiar as his own name to every cowboy west of the Missouri, whose hospitable ranch house, twenty-odd miles from the vest pocket metropolis of Coyote Centre, which in turn, to quote Landor himself, was “a hundred miles from nowhere,” was the Mecca of every traveller whom chance drew into this wild, of every curious tenderfoot seeking a glimpse of the reverse side of the coin of life, of every desperate “one lunger,” who, with gambler instinct, staked his all on prairie sun and prairie air.

CHAPTER V

THE LAND OF LICENCE

For twenty-four hours the two cowmen from the distant Clay Creek ranch had owned Coyote Centre.  An hour before sunset on the day previous they had suddenly blown in from the north; a great cloud of yellow dust, lifting lazily on the sultry air, a mighty panting of winded bronchos, a single demoniacal dare-man whoop heralding their coming, a groaning of straining leather, a jingle of great spurs, and an otherwise augmented stillness even in this silent land, marking their arrival.  Pete it was, Pete Sweeney, “Long Pete,” who first dismounted.  Pete likewise it was who first entered the grog shop of Red Jenkins.  Pete again it was who, ere ten words had passed, drew cold-blooded, point blank at the only man who saw fit to question the invader’s right of absolute ownership.  Pete it was once again who, when the smoke had cleared away, assisted in laying out that same misguided citizen, in decent fellowship, beneath the cottonwood bar, and thrust an adequate green roll in the stiffening hand for funeral expenses.