A year later I was at a desolate little mud road ranch on the Deadwood trail.  It was kept by a very capable and very forceful woman, with sound ideas of justice and abundantly well able to hold her own.  Her husband was a worthless devil, who finally got drunk on some whisky he obtained from an outfit of Missouri bull-whackers—­that is, freighters, driving ox wagons.  Under the stimulus of the whisky he picked a quarrel with his wife and attempted to beat her.  She knocked him down with a stove-lid lifter, and the admiring bull-whackers bore him off, leaving the lady in full possession of the ranch.  When I visited her she had a man named Crow Joe working for her, a slab-sided, shifty-eyed person who later, as I heard my foreman explain, “skipped the country with a bunch of horses.”  The mistress of the ranch made first-class buckskin shirts of great durability.  The one she made for me, and which I used for years, was used by one of my sons in Arizona a couple of winters ago.  I had ridden down into the country after some lost horses, and visited the ranch to get her to make me the buckskin shirt in question.  There were, at the moment, three Indians there, Sioux, well behaved and self-respecting, and she explained to me that they had been resting there waiting for dinner, and that a white man had come along and tried to run off their horses.  The Indians were on the lookout, however, and, running out, they caught the man; but, after retaking their horses and depriving him of his gun, they let him go.  “I don’t see why they let him go,” exclaimed my hostess.  “I don’t believe in stealing Indians’ horses any more than white folks’; so I told ’em they could go along and hang him—­I’d never cheep.  Anyhow, I won’t charge them anything for their dinner,” concluded my hostess.  She was in advance of the usual morality of the time and place, which drew a sharp line between stealing citizens’ horses and stealing horses from the Government or the Indians.

A fairly decent citizen, Jap Hunt, who long ago met a violent death, exemplified this attitude towards Indians in some remarks I once heard him make.  He had started a horse ranch, and had quite honestly purchased a number of broken-down horses of different brands, with the view of doctoring them and selling them again.  About this time there had been much horse-stealing and cattle-killing in our Territory and in Montana, and under the direction of some of the big cattle-growers a committee of vigilantes had been organized to take action against the rustlers, as the horse thieves and cattle thieves were called.  The vigilantes, or stranglers, as they were locally known, did their work thoroughly; but, as always happens with bodies of the kind, toward the end they grew reckless in their actions, paid off private grudges, and hung men on slight provocation.  Riding into Jap Hunt’s ranch, they nearly hung him because he had so many horses of different brands.  He was finally let off.  He was much upset by the