make such a
cosmopolitan assembly.

All Manhattan came to look at the men who had lived and fought and
conquered under the limitless skies of the Far West, free men, wild
men--one of their shrill whoops banished distance and brought the
mountain desert into the very heart of the unromantic East.
Nevertheless from all these thrills these two men remained immune.

To be sure the smaller tilted his head back when the horses first swept
in, and the larger leaned to watch when Diaz, the wizard with the
lariat, commenced to whirl his rope; but in both cases their interest
held no longer than if they had been old vaudevillians watching a series
of familiar acts dressed up with new names.

The smaller, brown as if a thousand fierce suns and winds had tanned and
withered him, looked up at last to his burly companion with a faint
smile.

"They're bringing on the cream now, Drew, but I'm going to spoil the
dessert."

The other was a great, grey man whom age apparently had not weakened but
rather settled and hardened into an ironlike durability; the winds of
time or misfortune would have to break that stanch oak before it would
bend.

He said: "We've half an hour before our train leaves. Can you play your
hand in that time?"

"Easy. Look at 'em now--the greatest gang of liars that never threw a
diamond hitch! Ride? I've got a ten-year kid home that would laugh at
'em all. But I'll show 'em up. Want to know my little stunt?"

"I'll wait and enjoy the surprise."

The wild riders who provoked the scorn of the smaller man were now
gathering in the central space; a formidable crew, long of hair and
brilliant as to bandannas, while the announcer thundered through his
megaphone:

"La-a-a-dies and gen'l'mun! You see before you the greatest band of
subduers and breakers of wild horses that ever rode the cattle ranges.
Death defying, reckless, and laughing at peril, they have never failed;
they have never pulled leather. I present 'Happy' Morgan!"

Happy Morgan, yelling like one possessed of ten shrill-tongued demons,
burst on the gallop away from the others, and spurring his horse
cruelly, forced the animal to race, bucking and plunging, half way
around the arena and back to the group. This, then, was a type of the
dare-devil horse breaker of the Wild West? The cheers travelled in waves
around and around the house and rocked back and forth like water pitched
from side to side in a monstrous bowl.

When the noise abated some