CHAPTER I: THE LINE-RIDER

DAY WAS BREAKING IN THE Panhandle. The line-rider finished his breakfast of buffalo-hump, coffee, and biscuits. He had eaten heartily, for it would be long after sunset before he touched food again.

Cheerfully and tunelessly he warbled a cowboy ditty as he packed his supplies and prepared to go.

“Oh, it’s bacon and beans most every day,

I’d as lief be eatin’ prairie hay.”

While he washed his dishes in the fine sand and rinsed them in the current of the creek he ann