"AND SPEAK IN PASSING"

The events of that Sunday introduced Lambert into the Bad Lands and
established his name and fame. Within three months after going to work
for the Syndicate ranch he was known for a hundred miles around as the
man who had broken Jim Wilder's outlaw and won the horse by that
unparalleled feat.

That was the prop to his fame--that he had broken Jim Wilder's outlaw.
Certainly he was admired and commended for the unhesitating action he
had taken in avenging the death of his friend, but in that he had done
only what was expected of any man worthy the name. Breaking the outlaw
was a different matter entirely. In doing that he had accomplished what
was believed to be beyond the power of any living man.

According to his own belief, his own conscience, Lambert had made a bad
start. A career that had its beginning in contentions and violence,
enough of it crowded into one day to make more than the allotment of an
ordinary life, could not terminate with any degree of felicity and
honor. They thought little of killing a man in that country, it seemed;
no more than a perfunctory inquiry, to fulfill the letter of the law,
had been made by the authorities into Jim Wilder's death.

While it relieved him to know that the law held his justification to be
ample, there was a shadow following him which he could not evade in any
of the hilarious diversions common to those wild souls of the range.

It troubled him that he had killed a man, even in a fair fight in the
open field with the justification of society at his back. In his sleep
it harried him with visions; awake, it oppressed him like a sorrow, or
the memory of a shame. He became solemn and silent as a chastened man,
seldom smiling, laughing never.

When he drank with his companions in the little saloon at Misery, the
loading station on the railroad, he took his liquor as gravely as the
sacrament; when he raced them he rode with face grim as an Indian,
never whooping in victory, never swearing in defeat.

He had left even his own lawful and proper name behind him with his
past. Far and near he was known as the Duke of Chimney Butte, shortened
in cases of direct address to "Duke." He didn't resent it, rather took a
sort of grim pride in it, although he felt at times that it was one more
mark of his surrender to circumstances whose current he might have
avoided at the beginning by the exercise of a proper man's sense.

A man was expected to drink a g