had brought, lacking a few
days, a year ago.

"'Morning. Them beeves is just turned out on the trail. Shall I drive
'em to Barber's, or--"

He saw Webb and stopped, open-mouthed.

"Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!" shrieked the king in his cradle, beating the air
with his fists.

"You hear your boss, Bud," said Webb Yeager, with a broad grin--just
as he had said a year ago.

And that is all, except that when old man Quinn, owner of the Rancho
Seco, went out to look over the herd of Sussex cattle that he had
bought from the Nopalito ranch, he asked his new manager:

"What's the Nopalito ranch brand, Wilson?"

"X Bar Y," said Wilson.

"I thought so," said Quinn. "But look at that white heifer there;
she's got another brand--a heart with a cross inside of it. What brand
is that?"

II

THE RANSOM OF MACK

Me and old Mack Lonsbury, we got out of that Little Hide-and-Seek gold
mine affair with about $40,000 apiece. I say "old" Mack; but he wasn't
old. Forty-one, I should say; but he always seemed old.

"Andy," he says to me, "I'm tired of hustling. You and me have been
working hard together for three years. Say we knock off for a while,
and spend some of this idle money we've coaxed our way."

"The proposition hits me just right," says I. "Let's be nabobs for a
while and see how it feels. What'll we do--take in the Niagara Falls,
or buck at faro?"

"For a good many years," says Mack, "I've thought that if I ever had
extravagant money I'd rent a two-room cabin somewhere, hire a Chinaman
to cook, and sit in my stocking feet and read Buckle's History of
Civilisation."

"That sounds self-indulgent and gratifying without vulgar
ostentation," says I; "and I don't see how money could be better
invested. Give me a cuckoo clock and a Sep Winner's Self-Instructor
for the Banjo, and I'll join you."

A week afterwards me and Mack hits this small town of Pina, about
thirty miles out from Denver, and finds an elegant two-room house that
just suits us. We deposited half-a-peck of money in the Pina bank and
shook hands with every one of the 340 citizens in the town. We brought
along the Chinaman and the cuckoo clock and Buckle and the Instructor
with us from Denver; and they made the cabin seem like home at once.

Never believe it when they tell you riches don't bring happiness. If
you could have seen old Mack sitting in his rocking-chair with his
blue-yarn sock feet up in the window and absorbing in that Buckle
stuff through