Beyond each sky-line lay cities and ports where the world went on out of sight and hearing.  This lone steel thread had been stretched across the continent because it was the day of haste and hope, when dollars seemed many and hard times were few; and from the Yellowstone to the Rio Grande similar threads were stretching, and little Separs by dispersed hundreds hung on them, as it were in space eternal.  Can you wonder that vigorous young men with pistols should, when they came to such a place, shoot them off to let loose their unbounded joy of living?

And yet it was not this merely that began the custom, but an error of the agent’s.  The new station was scarce created when one morning Honey Wiggin with the Virginian had galloped innocently in from the round-up to telegraph for some additional cars.

“I’m dead on to you!” squealed the official, dropping flat at the sight of them; and bang went his gun at them.  They, most naturally, thought it was a maniac, and ran for their lives among the supports of the water-tank, while he remained anchored with his weapon, crouched behind the railing that fenced him and his apparatus from the laity; and some fifteen strategic minutes passed before all parties had crawled forth to an understanding, and the message was written and paid for and comfortably despatched.  The agent was an honest creature, but of tame habits, sent for the sake of his imperfect lungs to this otherwise inappropriate air.  He had lived chiefly in mid-West towns, a serious reader of our comic weeklies; hence the apparition of Wiggin and the Virginian had reminded him sickeningly of bandits.  He had express money in the safe, he explained to them, and this was a hard old country, wasn’t it? and did they like good whiskey?

They drank his whiskey, but it was not well to have mentioned that about the bandits.  Both were aware that when shaved and washed of their round-up grime they could look very engaging.  The two cow-punchers rode out, not angry, but grieved that a man come here to dwell among them should be so tactless.

“If we don’t get him used to us,” observed the Virginian, “he and his pop-gun will be guttin’ some blameless man.”

Forthwith the cattle country proceeded to get the agent used to it.  The news went over the sage-brush from Belle Fourche to Sweetwater, and playful, howling horsemen made it their custom to go rioting with pistols round the ticket office, educating the agent.  His lungs improved, and he came dimly to smile at this life which he did not understand.  But the company discerned no humor whatever in having its water-tank perforated, which happened twice; and sheriffs and deputies and other symptoms of authority began to invest Separ.  Now what should authority do upon these free plains, this wilderness of do-as-you-please, where mere breathing the air was like inebriation?  The large, headlong children who swept in from the sage-brush and out again meant nothing that they called