chard. We were less than five
miles from the burg, and struck a free gait in riding in, where we
found several hundred of our craft holding high jinks. A number of
herds had paid off their outfits and were sending them home, while
from the herds for sale, holding along the river, every man not on day
herd was paying his respects to the town. We had not been there five
minutes when a horse race was run through the main street, Nat Straw
and Jim Flood acting as judges on the outcome. The officers of
Ogalalla were a different crowd from what we had encountered at Dodge,
and everything went. The place suited us. Straw had entirely forgotten
our "cow" of the night before, and when The Rebel handed him his share
of the winnings, he tucked it away in the watch pocket of his trousers
without counting. But he had arranged a fiddling match between a darky
cook of one of the returning outfits and a locoed white man, a
mendicant of the place, and invited us to be present. Straw knew the
foreman of the outfit to which the darky belonged, and the two had
fixed it up to pit the two in a contest, under the pretense that a
large wager had been made on which was the better fiddler. The contest
was to take place at once in the corral of the Lone Star livery
stable, and promised to be humorous if nothing more. So after the race
was over, the next number on the programme was the fiddling match, and
we followed the crowd. The Rebel had given us the slip during the
race, though none of us cared, as we knew he was hungering for a monte
game. It was a motley crowd which had gathered in the corral, and all
seemed to know of the farce to be enacted, though the Texas outfit to
which the darky belonged were flashing their money on their dusky
cook, "as the best fiddler that ever crossed Red River with a cow
herd."

"Oh, I don't know that your man is such an Ole Bull as all that," said
Nat Straw. "I just got a hundred posted which says he can't even play
a decent second to my man. And if we can get a competent set of judges
to decide the contest, I'll wager a little more on the white against
the black, though I know your man is a cracker-jack."

A canvass of the crowd was made for judges, but as nearly every one
claimed to be interested in the result, having made wagers, or was
incompetent to sit in judgment on a musical contest, there was some
little delay. Finally, Joe Stallings went to Nat Straw and told him
that I was a fiddler, whereupon he i