Sunset Ranch: A Story of a Boy's Adventures in the West — page 23: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Tenderfoot. 17 worked the gun with such disastrous results to the snarling wolves. “Right glad to know you; needn’t be ashamed of what happened. No man could have shown more bull pluck in facin’ the critters. Me? Oh, I’m only Karl, a range rider, off his beat, and’—here he grinned broadly—‘lookin’ for trouble, as Old Sile Says.” | It was a strange meeting, and one heavily charged with fateful issues. Ten minutes before neither knew of the other’s existence, yet now their life lines had crossed, and they were destined to endure much in common. To Cuthbert it was a meeting fraught with mo- mentous possibilities. Strange as it may seem, this college lad had con- ceived an ardent desire to become a centaur of the plains, a cowboy, one of those dashing spirits whose wild life possessed a fascination for him which he could hardly understand, much less explain. And in this wiry lad, whose home was in the sad- dle, and who was doubtless just as expert at sending a rope lasso through the air or taming a vicious broncho as he had shown himself to be with a gun, he saw his ideal. But this was not the sole cause of Cuthbert Lee finding himself under a Dakota sky. There was an- other and a far more potent reason. Had Karl been able to peep into the Lee home way back in Virginia he would have found that this plucky youngster whose life he had saved was bound up in a mystery in the unraveling of which he was to witness many strange scenes and live through countless hardships. Karl had meanwhile dismounted, and was picket- ing his horse after the custom of his kind. Without warning, save a sudden shout, he sprang to one side and began to stamp and thresh around like one who had taken leave of his senses; but Comicaoo ‘S ie CO