Browning chief. [volume] (Browning, Mont.) 1941-1953, 1944-02-04
CHAPTER 1

Even those names that meant so
much have vanished now, SO that
you will look in vain for Ok Bow or
Dripping Spring or the valley of the
Little Comanche on any recent map.
And it is hard to believe that this
land where flashing beacons now
guide the roaring course of planes
by night, and by day motorcars dart
effortlessly across its endless miles,
was then but a wild and rolling
prairie of buffalo grass, and jour-
ney of any length had no certain
ending, and all of restless nation
seemed to be following the sun in
mad race set off by the cry, GO
West, young man, 60 WeSt!'-not
sixty years ago.
This was time of new and I'M
believable happenings. Pullman's
Golden Palace cars were running
clear to the Pacific, with their red
velvet curtained windows, their gas
lamps that made the coaches as
brilliant as ladies' drawing room
and their sleeping compartments in
which many women still refused to
undress when going to bed at night.
Three thousand Negroes were
marching afoot from Alabama, with
their women and children and half
starved dogs, to claim the forty
acres of land and the span of mules
which the state of Kansas promised.
Boxcar emigrant trains rolled out
of the East one upon another, spew-
ing settlers along the way, and the
high-topped Pittsburg wagons lum-
bered West behind their OK teams,
to meet-not barren prairie-but
the red swarms of Texas longhorns
coming up from the South.
For this was time when the man
in the saddle was king of the plains
and prairie; all others were hoe
men, beneath him, to be swept aside
by the relentless march of his trail
herds. Ten million Texas longhorns
that had run wild since the Rebel
lion were finding a market in the
shipping towns of the new railroads;
thousand cattle ranches were be-
ing made in the new lands of Mon
Mana and Wyoming, where cattle
had never been before. Up that
trail, twelve hundred miles long, I'M
checked by storm or drouth, by row.
ing bands of Comanches or the
barbed wire of the hoe-men, the
great flood poured northward, mil
lion head in single year.
This was a time of young mans
opportunity. Whatever a man was
going to be depended only upon him
self.
In the upper valley of the Little
Comanche that night only one camp
fire pierced the blackness, a small
one, glowing family where high rim
rock guarded narrow entrance
down from the vast empty reaches
of the Staked Plain.
Lew Burnet was cooking supper
over cautious blaze. He had laid
his cottonwood twigs together at the
ends, Indian fashion, spreading
them outward like the spokes of a
wheel. That way they burned with
no smoke and a small flame, but
made an intense point of heat be-
meath his pot of coffee.
The coffee boiled and he pushed
the pot back A comb of antelope
ribs, already praised, stood propped
against rock. A pile of stick bread
lay at his knee. He tore the antelope
ribs apart and fell to eating with the
hunger of a man who'd had nothing
since dawn.
His was young face, with sober
strength in its long lines, but
strangely marked from the tram
ping hoofs of an outlaw horse years
ago. There was left now only a
curved crease from his right cheek
bone to his chin and white cres-
cent close to the hairline of his fore
head. Yet those first years when
the wounds were raw and ugly had
left another mark. He had never
forgotten how the girls turned from
him, shocked, and he had under
stood.
A sensitive nature protects itself
in deeply hidden ways, and this ear
ly accident had made Lew Burnet,
more than he realized, a restless
and lonely man. His work had all
been mans work, hard and danger
GUS and single-handed; at twenty
five he had bossed three great herds
of longhorns up the trail from Texas
to Dodge and Ogallala. Even the
new ranch he had established in Wy
oming this past winter had risen in
his vision as place only for HIM
self.
There had been too little informa-
ton in Tom Arnold's letter. He
wanted more, even more, perhaps,
than Arnold could give. A month
ago he had mailed letter of his
own south from Wyoming, and late
this afternoon, before coming down
off the rimrock, he had stopped long
enough to kindle a pillar of white
smoke into the still air. He had
whipped his rawhide coat across it
twice. breaking it. If old Willy
NiclSle had received the letter and
had stayed anywhere within twenty
miles of the Little Comanche he
would see that signal and know this