had a good excuse to offer.

Honeyman was left-handed and threw a rope splendidly; and as we
circled around the horses on opposite sides, on a signal from him we
whirled our lariats and made casts simultaneously. The wrangler
fastened to the brown I wanted, and my loop settled around the neck of
his unridden horse. As the band broke away from our swinging ropes, a
number of them ran afoul of my rope; but I gave the rowel to my
_grulla_, and we shook them off. When I returned to Honeyman, and we
had exchanged horses and were shifting our saddles, I complimented him
on the long throw he had made in catching the brown, and incidentally
mentioned that I had read of vaqueros in California who used a
sixty-five foot lariat. "Hell," said Billy, in ridicule of the idea,
"there wasn't a man ever born who could throw a sixty-five foot rope
its full length--without he threw it down a well."

The sun was straight overhead when we started back to overtake the
herd. We struck into a little better than a five-mile gait on the
return trip, and about two o'clock sighted a band of saddle horses and
a wagon camped perhaps a mile forward and to the side of the trail. On
coming near enough, we saw at a glance it was a cow outfit, and after
driving our loose horses a good push beyond their camp, turned and
rode back to their wagon.

"We 'll give them a chance to ask us to eat," said Billy to me, "and
if they don't, why, they'll miss a hell of a good chance to entertain
hungry men."

But the foreman with the stranger wagon proved to be a Bee County
Texan, and our doubts did him an injustice, for, although dinner was
over, he invited us to dismount and ordered his cook to set out
something to eat. They had met our wagon, and McCann had insisted on
their taking a quarter of our beef, so we fared well. The outfit was
from a ranch near Miles City, Montana, and were going down to receive
a herd of cattle at Cheyenne, Wyoming. The cattle had been bought at
Ogalalla for delivery at the former point, and this wagon was going
down with their ranch outfit to take the herd on its arrival. They had
brought along about seventy-five saddle horses from the ranch, though
in buying the herd they had taken its _remuda_ of over a hundred
saddle horses. The foreman informed us that they had met our cattle
about the middle of the forenoon, nearly twenty-five miles out from
Powder River. After we had satisfied the inner man, we lost no time
getting off, as we