plain Bill, from the river to the Hills, husband these ten
years now, but not father, Cattle King of an uncontested range. Of this
life likewise, bred in it, saturated in it, was a dark young woman, his
adopted daughter, two years past her majority, Elizabeth Rowland Landor
by name. Of it most vitally of all, born of it, rooted in it through
unknown centuries of ancestral domicile, was a copper-brown young man,
destitute as a boy of twelve of a trace of beard, black as a prairie
crow of hair and eyes, deep-lunged like a race-track thoroughbred, wiry
as a mustang, garbed as a white man, but bearing the liquid name of a
Teton Sioux, "Ma-wa-cha-sa, the lost pappoose," yet known wherever the
Santee Massacre and the tale of his appearance was known, as "How"
Landor. Of this period, last of all, was the great B.B.--Buffalo
Butte--ranch, giant among the giants, whose brand was familiar as his
own name to every cowboy west of the Missouri, whose hospitable ranch
house, twenty-odd miles from the vest pocket metropolis of Coyote
Centre, which in turn, to quote Landor himself, was "a hundred miles
from nowhere," was the Mecca of every traveller whom chance drew into
this wild, of every curious tenderfoot seeking a glimpse of the reverse
side of the coin of life, of every desperate "one lunger," who, with
gambler instinct, staked his all on prairie sun and prairie air.

CHAPTER V

THE LAND OF LICENCE

For twenty-four hours the two cowmen from the distant Clay Creek ranch
had owned Coyote Centre. An hour before sunset on the day previous they
had suddenly blown in from the north; a great cloud of yellow dust,
lifting lazily on the sultry air, a mighty panting of winded bronchos, a
single demoniacal dare-man whoop heralding their coming, a groaning of
straining leather, a jingle of great spurs, and an otherwise augmented
stillness even in this silent land, marking their arrival. Pete it was,
Pete Sweeney, "Long Pete," who first dismounted. Pete likewise it was
who first entered the grog shop of Red Jenkins. Pete again it was who,
ere ten words had passed, drew cold-blooded, point blank at the only man
who saw fit to question the invader's right of absolute ownership. Pete
it was once again who, when the smoke had cleared away, assisted in
laying out that same misguided citizen, in decent fellowship, beneath
the cottonwood bar, and thrust an adequate green roll in the stiffening
hand for funeral expenses.

"It's Bill's own