lk much." Some
people don't have to talk to say plenty. Hinkle was one of them. At
a reunion of trail drivers in San Antonio in October, 1928, Fred S.
Millard showed me his laboriously written reminiscences. He wanted
them printed. I introduced him to J. Marvin Hunter of Bandera, Texas,
publisher of _Frontier Times_. I told Hunter not to ruin the English
by trying to correct it, as he had processed many of the earth-born
reminiscences in _The Trail Drivers of Texas_. He printed Millard's _A
Cowpuncher of the Pecos_ in pamphlet form shortly thereafter. It begins:
"This is a piece I wrote for the Trail Drivers." They would understand
some things on which he was not explicit.

About 1940, as he told me, Bob Beverly of Lovington, New Mexico, made a
contract with the proprietor of the town's weekly newspaper to print his
reminiscences. By the time the contractor had set eighty-seven pages
of type he saw that he would lose money if he set any more. He gave Bob
Beverly back more manuscript than he had used and stapled a pamphlet
entitled _Hobo of the Rangeland_. The philosophy in it is more
interesting to me than the incidents. "The cowboy of the old West worked
in a land that seemed to be grieving over something--a kind of sadness,
loneliness in a deathly quiet. One not acquainted with the plains could
not understand what effect it had on the mind. It produced a heartache
and a sense of exile."

Crudely printed, but printed as the author talked, is _The End of the
Long Horn Trail_, by A. P. (Ott) Black, Selfridge, North Dakota (August,
1939). As I know from a letter from his _compadre_, Black was blind and
sixty-nine years old when he dictated his memoirs to a college graduate
who had sense enough to retain the flavor. Black's history is badly
botched, but reading him is like listening. "It took two coons and an
alligator to spend the summer on that cotton plantation.... Cowpunchers
were superstitious about owls. One who rode into my camp one night had
killed a man somewhere and was on the dodge. He was lying down by the
side of the campfire when an owl flew over into some hackberry trees
close by and started hooting. He got up from there right now, got his
horse in, saddled up and rode off into the night."

John Alley is--or was--a teacher. His _Memories of Roundup Days_,
University of Oklahoma Press, 1934 (just twenty small pages), is an
appraisal of range men, a criticism of life seldom found in old-timers
who look back