Chapter I: Preface

_In the Boys' Golden West Series I have done my best to present to its readers the West that I knew as a boy._

_Frontier days were made up of many different kinds of humans. There were men who were muddy-bellied coyotes, so low that they hugged the ground like a snake. There were girls whose cheeks were so toughened by shame as to be hardly knowable from squaws. There were stoic Indians with red-raw, liquor-dilated eyes, peaceable and just when sober, boastful and intolerant when drunk. And then there were those White Men, those moulders, those makers of the great, big open-hearted West, that had not yet been denatured by nesters and wire fences, men to whom a Colt gun was the court of last appeal and who did not carry a warrant in their pockets until it was worn out, men who faced staggering odds and danger single-handed and alone, men who created and worked out and made an Ideal Civilization,--a country where doors were left unlocked at night and the windows of the mind were always open,--men who were always kind to the weak and unprotected, even if they did have hoofs and horns, men like William B. (Bat) Masterson and Wyatt Earp. They and their kind made the frontier, that Great West which we can now look back upon as the most romantic era of our American History._

_I love it; I love all that was ever connected with it; and to all those who are in sympathy with my crude efforts to set forth what little I know, to each and every boy who feels a choke in his throat when he reads the closing lines of "In Memory," I say, I have a choke in my throat too, and I am silently clutching your hand, for that red boy has crossed the Big Divide and gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds and the white boy is saying Farewell._

The Author

CONTENTS

I. An Arrival 1

II. A Surprise 13

III. Mystery 26

IV. Solution 39

V. Bunk-House Talk 51

VI. Boots 66

VII. Education and Other Things 77

VIII. Injun Talks 87

IX. Fish-Hooks and Hooky 115

X. A Hard Job 129

XI. The T Up and Down 139

XII. Felix the Faithless 150

XIII. A Fool's Errand 160

XIV. The Stampede 170

XV. The Cattle-Sheep War 185

XVI. "Medicine" 206

XVII. "The Pride of the West" 218

XVIII. Wonders 229

XIX. Threshing-Time 235

XX. The Story of the Custer Fight 247

XXI. Unrest 263

XXII. The New Order 271

XXIII. Pioneer Days 290

XXIV. "In Memory" 299

ILLUSTRATIONS

They couldn't shoot him--he was going
too fast _Frontispiece_

In Front of Them Stood Sitting Bull 16

Advancing into the Road with both Front
Paws Extended 120

The Man's Figure disappeared through
the Opening, the Bucket falling from
his Hands 202

INJUN AND WHITEY TO THE RESCUE