a chance to get their second wind
while you let a little licker into that system of yours."

The Mayor grinned; "Tex Benton, hain't you had no bringin' up whatever?
That was a pretty throw but it's onrespectable, no mor'n what it's
respectable to call the Mayor of a place by his first name to a public
meetin'."

"I plumb ferget myself, your Honour," laughed the cowpuncher as he
coiled his rope. "Fact is, I learnt to rope mares back in Texas, an' I
ain't----"

"Yip-e-i-e!"

"Ropin' mares!" The cowboys broke into a coyote chorus that drowned
the laughter of the crowd.

"The drinks is on me!" sputtered the Mayor, when he was able to make
himself heard. "Jest you boys high-tail over to the Long Horn an' I'll
be along d'rectly." He turned once more to the crowd of passengers.

"Come on, gents, an' have a drink on me. An' the ladies is welcome,
too. Wolf River is broad in her idees. We hain't got no sexual
restrictions, an' a lady's got as good a right to front a bar an'
nominate her licker as what a man has."

Standing beside Endicott upon the edge of the crowd Alice Marcum had
enjoyed herself hugely. The little wooden town with its high fenced
cattle corrals, and its row of one story buildings that faced the
alkali flat had interested her from the first, and she had joined with
hearty goodwill in the rounds of applause that at frequent intervals
had interrupted the speech of the little town's Mayor. A born
horsewoman, she had watched with breathless admiration the onrush of
the loose-rein riders--the graceful swaying of their bodies, and the
flapping of soft hat brims, as their horses approached with a thunder
of pounding hoofs. Her eyes had sparkled at the reckless swerving of
the horses when it seemed that the next moment the back-surging crowd
would be trampled into the ground. She had wondered at the precision
with which the Texan's loop fell; and had joined heartily in the
laughter that greeted the ludicrous and red-faced indignation with
which a fat woman had crawled from beneath a coach whither she had
sought refuge from the onrush of thundering hoofs.

In the mind of the girl, cowboys had always been associated with motion
picture theatres, where concourses of circus riders in impossible
regalia performed impossible feats of horsemanship in the unravelling
of impossible plots. She had never thought of them as real--or, if she
had, it was as a vanished race, like the Aztec and the buffalo.

B