way, here goes; and if you don't like it, you know you can quit
at any stage of the game.

It happened when I was a kid and didn't know any better than to do such
things. They dared me to go up to Hooper's ranch and stay all night; and
as I had no information on either the ranch or its owner, I saddled up
and went. It was only twelve miles from our Box Springs ranch--a nice
easy ride. I should explain that heretofore I had ridden the Gila end of
our range, which is so far away that only vague rumours of Hooper had
ever reached me at all. He was reputed a tough old devil with horrid
habits; but that meant little to me. The tougher and horrider they came,
the better they suited me--so I thought. Just to make everything
entirely clear I will add that this was in the year of 1897 and the Soda
Springs valley in Arizona.

By these two facts you old timers will gather the setting of my tale.
Indian days over; "nester" days with frame houses and vegetable patches
not yet here. Still a few guns packed for business purposes; Mexican
border handy; no railroad in to Tombstone yet; cattle rustlers lingering
in the Galiuros; train hold-ups and homicide yet prevalent but frowned
upon; favourite tipple whiskey toddy with sugar; but the old fortified
ranches all gone; longhorns crowded out by shorthorn blaze-head
Herefords or near-Herefords; some indignation against Alfred Henry
Lewis's _Wolfville_ as a base libel; and, also but, no gasoline wagons
or pumps, no white collars, no tourists pervading the desert, and the
Injins still wearing blankets and overalls at their reservations instead
of bead work on the railway platforms when the Overland goes through. In
other words, we were wild and wooly, but sincerely didn't know it.

While I was saddling up to go take my dare, old Jed Parker came and
leaned himself up against the snubbing post of the corral. He watched me
for a while, and I kept quiet, knowing well enough that he had something
to say.

"Know Hooper?" he asked.

"I've seen him driving by," said I.

I had: a little humped, insignificant figure with close-cropped white
hair beneath a huge hat. He drove all hunched up. His buckboard was a
rattletrap, old, insulting challenge to every little stone in the road;
but there was nothing the matter with the horses or their harness. We
never held much with grooming in Arizona, but these beasts shone like
bronze. Good sizeable horses, clean built--well, I better not get
started talk