The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up, by
Clarence Edward Mulford

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Title: Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up
Bar-20

Author: Clarence Edward Mulford

Release Date: March, 2001 [Etext #2546]
Posting Date: November 13, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOPALONG CASSIDY ***

Produced by Andrew Heath

HOPALONG CASSIDY'S RUSTLER ROUND-UP

or

BAR-20

By Clarence Edward Mulford

1906

CHAPTER I. Buckskin

The town lay sprawled over half a square mile of alkali plain, its main
Street depressing in its width, for those who were responsible for its
inception had worked with a generosity born of the knowledge that they
had at their immediate and unchallenged disposal the broad lands of
Texas and New Mexico on which to assemble a grand total of twenty
buildings, four of which were of wood. As this material was scarce, and
had to be brought from where the waters of the Gulf lapped against the
flat coast, the last-mentioned buildings were a matter of local pride,
as indicating the progressiveness of their owners.

These creations of hammer and saw were of one story, crude and
unpainted; their cheap weather sheathing, warped and shrunken by the
pitiless sun, curled back on itself and allowed unrestricted entrance to
alkali dust and air. The other shacks were of adobe, and reposed in that
magnificent squalor dear to their owners, Indians and Mexicans.

It was an incident of the Cattle Trail, that most unique and stupendous
of all modern migrations, and its founders must have been inspired with
a malicious desire to perpetrate a crime against geography, or else they
reveled in a perverse cussedness, for within a mile on every side lay
broad prairies, and two miles to the east flowed the indolent waters of
the Rio Pecos itself. The distance separating the town from the river
was excusable, for at certain seasons of the year the placid stream
swelled mightily and swept down in a broad expanse of turbulent, yellow
flood.

Buckskin was a town of one hundred inhabitants, located in the valley of
the Rio Pecos fifty miles south of the Texas-N