owboy life. It
means that you must begin again from the ground up, as if you were a
perfectly new tenderfoot from Nebraska.

Fort Keno was, of course, not a real fort; but it was a real barracks.
The town was an imitation town. The fort, spick, span, in rows, with
nicely planted trees and green grass-plats (kept in condition at vast
expense to the War Department), stood on the bank of the sluggish river,
while just below it and across the stream sprawled the town, drab,
flea-bitten, unkempt, littered with tin cans and old bottles, a
collection of saloons, gambling-houses and nameless dives, with a few
people--a very few--making an honest living by selling groceries,
saddles, and coal-oil.

Among the industries of Keno City was a livery-and-sales stable, and
Kelley, with intent to punish himself, at once applied for the position
of hostler. "You durned fool," he said, addressing himself, "as you've
played the drunken Injun, suppose you play valet to a lot of mustangs
for a while."

As a disciplinary design he felicitated himself as having hit upon the
most humiliating and distasteful position in Keno. It was understood
that Harford of the Cottonwood Corral never hired a real man as hostler.
He seemed to prefer bums and tramps, either because he could get them
cheaper or else because no decent man would work for him. He was an
"arbitrary cuss" and ready with gun or boot. He came down a long trail
of weather-worn experiences in the Southwest, and showed it in both face
and voice. He was a big man who had once been fatter, but his wrinkled
and sour visage seldom crinkled into a smile. He had never been jolly,
and he was now morose.

Kelley hated him. That, too, was another part of his elaborate scheme of
self-punishment--hated, but did not fear him, for Tall Ed Kelley feared
nothing that walked the earth or sailed the air. "You bum," he continued
to say in bitter derision as he caught glimpses of himself of a morning
in the little fragment of broken glass which, being tacked on the wall,
served as mirror in the office. "You durned mangy coyote, you need a
shave, but you won't get it. You need a clean shirt and a new bandanna,
but you won't get them, neither--not yet awhile. You'll earn 'em by
going without a drop of whisky and by forking manure fer the next six
months. You hear me?"

He slept in the barn on a soiled, ill-smelling bunk, and his hours of
repose were broken by calls on the telephone or by some one beatin