lf into his coat, and took a last, long pull at the cigarette stub
before he threw it away. It was not much of a clue that he had fallen
upon by chance, but Luck was not one to wait until he was slapped in the
face with a fact. He had intended swinging back through Arizona, where in
certain parts cattle still were wild enough to bunch up at sight of a man
afoot. His questioning of the dried little man had not been born of any
concrete purpose, but of the range man's plaint in the abstract. Still--

"Say, brother, what's the Flying U's home town?" he called after the
dried little man with his amiable, Southern drawl.

"Huh? Dry Lake. Yuh taking this train?"

"So long--taking it for a ways, yes." Luck hurried down to where a
kinky-haired porter stood apathetically beside the steps of his coach.
Dry Lake? He had never heard of the place, but he could find out from the
railroad map or the conductor. He swung his grip into the waiting hand of
the porter and went up the steps hurriedly. He meant to find out where
Dry Lake was, and whether this train would take him there.

CHAPTER TWO

"WHERE THE CATTLE ROAMED IN THOUSANDS, A-MANY A HERD AND BRAND ..."--_Old
Range Song_.

If you are at all curious over the name to which Luck Lindsay answered
unhesitatingly,--his very acceptance of it proving his willingness to be
so identified,--I can easily explain. Some nicknames have their origin in
mystery; there was no mystery at all surrounding the name men had
bestowed upon Lucas Justin Lindsay. In the first place, his legal
cognomen being a mere pandering to the vanity of two grandfathers who had
no love for each other and so must both be mollified, never had appealed
to Luck or to any of his friends. Luck would have been grateful for any
nickname that would have wiped Lucas Justin from the minds of men. But
the real reason was a quirk in Luck's philosophy of life. Anything that
he greatly desired to see accomplished, he professed to leave to chance.
He would smile his smile, and lift his shoulders in the Spanish way he
had learned in Mexico and the Philippines, and say: "That's as luck will
have it. _Quien sabe_?" Then he would straightway go about bringing the
thing to pass by his own dogged efforts. Men fell into the habit of
calling him Luck, and they forgot that he had any other name; so there
you have it, straight and easily understandable.

As luck would have it, then,--and no pun intended, please,--he found
himse