bloody angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week,
met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled before that
of the town. There were more graves than houses. This superbly
wasteful day, how could it presage that which was to come? In this
riotous army of invasion, who could have foreseen the population which
was to follow, adventurous yet tenacious, resolved first upon
independence, and next upon knowledge, and then upon the fruits of
knowledge? Nay, perhaps, after all, the prescience of this coming time
lay over Ellisville the Red, so that it roared the more tempestuously
on through its brief, brazen day.

CHAPTER XVIII

STILL A REBEL

In the swift current of humanity then streaming up and down the cattle
range, the reputation of the Halfway House was carried far and near;
and for fifty miles east and west, for five hundred miles north and
south, the beauty of the girl at the Halfway House was matter of
general story. This was a new sort of being, this stranger from
another land, and when applied to her, all the standards of the time
fell short or wide. About her there grew a saga of the cow range, and
she was spoken of with awe from the Brazos to the Blue. Many a rude
cowman made long pilgrimage to verify rumours he had heard of the
personal beauty, the personal sweetness of nature, the personal
kindness of heart, and yet the personal reserve and dignity of this new
goddess, whose like was not to be found in all the wide realms of the
range. Such sceptics came in doubt, but they remained silent and
departed reverent. Wider and wider grew her circle of devoted
friends--wild and desperate men who rarely knew a roof and whose hands
stayed at no deed, but who knew with unerring accuracy the value of a
real woman.

For each of these rude, silent, awkward range riders, who stammered in
all speech except to men or horses, and who stumbled in all locomotion
but that of the saddle, Mary Ellen had a kind spot in her soul, never
ceasing to wonder as she did at the customs and traditions of their
life. Pinky Smith, laid up at the Halfway House with a broken leg
(with which he had come in the saddle for over fifty miles), was
blither in bed than he had ever been at table. Ike Wallace, down with
a fever at the same place, got reeling into saddle at dawn of a
cheerless day, and rode himself and a horse to death that day in
stopping a stampede. Pain they knew not, fear they had no