Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine, Vol. 107 No. 3 — page 30: what you’re looking at

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

372 “It’s a queer kind of a name to call a man by. How did they come to give it to your”’ “Well, sir, I give myself that name, you might say, when you come to figger it down to cases. I was breakin’ a horse when I first come out here four years ago, headin’ at that time for Wyoming. He throwed me. When I didn’t hop him agin, the boys come over to see if I was busted. When they asked me if I was hurt, I says, ‘ He snapped my dern old leg like a ‘ tater.’ And’ from that day on they called me Taterleg. Yes, and I guess I’d ’a’ been in Wyoming now, maybe with a oyster parlor and a wife on my hands, if it hadn’t been for that blame horse.” He paused reminiscently; then he said: “Where was you aimin’ to camp to- night, duke?”’ “Where does the flier stop after it passes Misery, going west?” “It stops for water at Glendora, about fifty or fifty-five miles west, sometimes. I’ve heard ’em say if a feller buys a ticket for there in Chicago, it ll let him off. But I don’t guess it stops there regular. Why, duke? Was you aimin’ to take the flier _ there?” ) “No. We'll stop there to-night, then, if your horse can make it.”’ “* Make it! If he can’t I’ll eat him raw. He’s made seventy-five many a time before to-day.” So they fared on that first day, in friend- ly converse. At sunset they drew up on a mesa, high above the treeless, broken coun- try through which they had been riding all day, and saw Glendora in the valley below them. “There she is,” said Taterleg. “I won- der what we're goin’ to run into down there?”’ CHAPTER VI. ALLUREMENTS OF GLENDORA. [N a bend of the Little Missouri, where it broadened out and: took on the appear- ance of a consequential stream, Glendora lay, a lonely little village with a gray hill behind it. ARGOSY AND RAILROAD MAN’S MAGAZINE. Only enough remained in the town to live by its trade. Close by the station there were cattle- pens for loading, and two long tracks for holding the cars. In the autumn fat cattle were driven down out of the hidden valleys and entrained there for market, and in those days there was merriment after night- fall in Glendora. At other times Glendora was mainly a quiet place, the shooting that was done in its streets being of a peaceful nature in the way of expressing a feeling for which some plain-witted, drunken cow- herder had no words. Into this atmosphere there had come, many years before, one of those innocents among men whose misfortune it is to fall before the beguilements of the dishonest; that sort of man whom the promoters of schemes go out to catch in the manner of an old maid catching flies in a glass of suds. Milton Philbrook was this man. Some- body had sold him forty thousand acres of land in a body for three dollars an acre. It began at the river and ran back to the hills for a matter of twenty miles. Find- ing no market for the brown coal to which he had acquired title, he resolved to be a cattle baron, and with what money he had left he fenced in the entire forty thousand acres, and then built him a house. Soon he had cattle grazing within his fences, which were guarded by men who rode the long lines of wire with rifles under their thighs, and at once his contentions and conflicts began. And following these feuds the trees which he planted around his house, the grass which he labored to set withered and died in spite of water from the river, strangers to the harsh ele- ments and unnutritive soil. His wife broke under the long strain of never-ending bat- tles, and died the spring that her daughter came eighteen years of age. The girl had grown up in the saddle, a true daughter of her fighting sire. Time and again she had led a patrol of two fence riders along one side of that sixty square miles of ranch while her father guarded the other. She could handle firearms with speed and accuracy equal to any man on the range. All this information pertaining to the @ OQ = 9) Gonmic