Alkali Valley,
An' oceans of gore
'ud wash sudden death
On the sage brush shore,
An' he shot a big hole--"

He got no further with the song. Another man stepped out from the crowd,
a very tall, powerful man who would have attracted attention in any garb
in any place by his distinguished appearance, who with little ceremony
rudely brushed the roughneck to one side, and my instinct told me the
handsome stranger could be no other than Big Pete Darlinkel.

My! my! what a man he was! Looked as if he just stepped out of one of
Fred Remington's pictures, or Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, or slipped
from between the leaves of a volume of Captain Mayne Reid's "Scalp
Hunters"--Big Pete was evidently a hold-over from another age. He would
have fitted perfectly and with nicety in a picture of Davy Crockett's
men down in old Texas. He seemed, however, perfectly at home in this
border town, and I noted that the most hard-boiled and toughest men in
the crowd treated him with marked respect and deference.

Pete was a wilderness fop and a dandy, and evidently was as careful of
his clothes as a West Point cadet. In dress he affected the
old-fashioned picturesque garb of the mountains. His appearance filled
me with wonder and admiration; he stood six feet two or three inches in
his moccasins, straight as an arrow and lithe as a cat.

His costume consisted of a tunic of dressed deer skin, smoked to the
softness of the finest flannels. He wore it belted in at the waist, but
open at the breast and throat where it fell back like a sailor's collar
into a short cape covering the shoulders. Underneath was the undershirt
of dressed fawn skin; his leggins and moccasins were of the same
material as his hunting shirt, and on his head he wore a fox skin cap;
the fox's head adorned with glass eyes ornamented the front and the tail
hung like a drooping plume over the left shoulder.

Big Pete Darlinkel was a blonde, and his golden hair hung in sunny curls
upon his massive shoulders; a light mustache, soft yellow beard, with a
pair of the deepest, clearest, most innocent baby-like blue eyes, all
made a face such as an angel might have after years of exposure to sun
and wind.

Not only are Big Pete's revolvers gold mounted, but the shaft of his
keen-edged knife is rich with figures, rings, and stars filed from gold
coins and set in the horn. The very stock of his long, single-barreled
rifle is inlaid like an Arab's gun, and, as for