ow, yer hit the trail
fer New York, an' keep goin'! Don't ever tackle the desert, 'specially
with them Mormons. They've got water on the brain, wusser 'n religion.
It's two hundred an' fifty miles from Flagstaff to Jones range, an'
only two drinks on the trail. I know this hyar Buffalo Jones. I knowed
him way back in the seventies, when he was doin' them ropin' stunts
thet made him famous as the preserver of the American bison. I know
about that crazy trip of his'n to the Barren Lands, after musk-ox. An'
I reckon I kin guess what he'll do over there in the Siwash. He'll rope
cougars--sure he will--an' watch 'em jump. Jones would rope the devil,
an' tie him down if the lasso didn't burn. Oh! he's hell on ropin'
things. An' he's wusser 'n hell on men, an' hosses, an' dogs."

All that my well-meaning friend suggested made me, of course, only the
more eager to go with Jones. Where I had once been interested in the
old buffalo hunter, I was now fascinated. And now I was with him in the
desert and seeing him as he was, a simple, quiet man, who fitted the
mountains and the silences, and the long reaches of distance.

"It does seem hard to believe--all this about Jones," remarked Judd,
one of Emmett's men.

"How could a man have the strength and the nerve? And isn't it cruel to
keep wild animals in captivity? it against God's word?"

Quick as speech could flow, Jones quoted: "And God said, 'Let us make
man in our image, and give him dominion over the fish of the sea, the
fowls of the air, over all the cattle, and over every creeping thing
that creepeth upon the earth'!"

"Dominion--over all the beasts of the field!" repeated Jones, his big
voice rolling out. He clenched his huge fists, and spread wide his long
arms. "Dominion! That was God's word!" The power and intensity of him
could be felt. Then he relaxed, dropped his arms, and once more grew
calm. But he had shown a glimpse of the great, strange and absorbing
passion of his life. Once he had told me how, when a mere child, he had
hazarded limb and neck to capture a fox squirrel, how he had held on to
the vicious little animal, though it bit his hand through; how he had
never learned to play the games of boyhood; that when the youths of the
little Illinois village were at play, he roamed the prairies, or the
rolling, wooded hills, or watched a gopher hole. That boy was father of
the man: for sixty years an enduring passion for dominion over wild
animals had possessed h