d it."

"And something down for expenses; a feller's got to live, and livin's
high."

Chadron drew out his wallet. Money passed into Mark's hand, and he put
it away in his pocket along with the list of names.

"I'll see you in the old place in Cheyenne for the settlement, if you
make good," Chadron told him.

Mark waved his hand in lofty depreciation of the hint that failure for
him was a possible contingency. He said no more. For a little while
Chadron stood looking down on him as he leaned with his pipe over the
dead ashes in the fireplace, his hand in the breast of his coat, where
he had stored his purse. Mark treated the mighty cattleman as if he
had become a stranger to him, along with the rest of the world in that
place, and Chadron turned and went his way.

CHAPTER II

BEEF DAY

Fort Shakie was on its downhill way in those days, and almost at the
bottom of the decline. It was considered a post of penance by enlisted
men and officers alike, nested up there in the high plateau against
the mountains in its place of wild beauty and picturesque charm.

But natural beauty and Indian picturesqueness do not fill the place in
the soldierly breast of fair civilian lady faces, nor torrential
streams of cold mountain water supply the music of the locomotive's
toot. Fort Shakie was being crept upon by civilization, true, but it
was coming all too slow for the booted troopers and belted officers
who must wear away the months in its lonely silences.

Within the memory of officers not yet gray the post had been a hundred
and fifty miles from a railroad. Now it was but twenty; but even that
short leap drowned the voice of the locomotive, and the dot at the
rails' end held few of the endearments which make soldiering sweet.

Soon the post must go, indeed, for the need of it had passed. The
Shoshones, Arapahoes, and Crows had forgotten their old animosities,
and were traveling with Buffalo Bill, going to college, and raising
alfalfa under the direction of a government farmer. The Indian police
were in training to do the soldiers' work there. Soon the post must
stand abandoned, a lonely monument to the days of hard riding, long
watches, and bleak years. Not a soldier in the service but prayed for
the hastening of the day.

No, there was not much over at Meander, at the railroad's end, to
cheer a soldier's heart. It was an inspiring ride, in these autumn
days, to come to Meander, past the little brimming lakes,