you hain't got no call to get mad. I
have decided the last eight cases in yer favor, and you kain't have it
go yer way all the time; it wouldn't look right;' and I had to be
satisfied."

The courts in that locality were but the faint and sickly flame of a
taper offered at the shrine of a justice which was traditional only, it
seemed. Moral forces having ceased to operate, the large owners began to
brand everything in sight, never realizing that they were sowing the
wind. This action naturally demoralized the cowboys, who shortly began
to brand a little on their own account--and then the deluge. The rights
of property having been destroyed, the large owners put strong outfits
in the field, composed of desperate men armed to the teeth, and what
happens in the lonely pine woods no one knows but the desperadoes
themselves, albeit some of them never come back to the little fringe of
settlements. The winter visitor from the North kicks up the jack-snipe
along the beach or tarponizes in the estuaries of the Gulf, and when he
comes to the hotel for dinner he eats Chicago dressed beef, but out in
the wilderness low-browed cow-folks shoot and stab each other for the
possession of scrawny creatures not fit for a pointer-dog to mess on.
One cannot but feel the force of Buckle's law of "the physical aspects
of nature" in this sad country. Flat and sandy, with miles on miles of
straight pine timber, each tree an exact duplicate of its neighbor tree,
and underneath the scrub palmettoes, the twisted brakes and
hammocks, and the gnarled water-oaks festooned with the sad gray
Spanish-moss--truly not a country for a high-spirited race or moral
giants.

[Illustration: 38 FIGHTING OVER A STOLEN HERD]

The land gives only a tough wiregrass, and the poor little cattle, no
bigger than a donkey, wander half starved and horribly emaciated in
search of it. There used to be a trade with Cuba, but now that has gone;
and beyond the supplying of Key West and the small fringe of settlements
they have no market. How well the cowboys serve their masters I can only
guess, since the big owners do not dare go into the woods, or even to
their own doors at night, and they do not keep a light burning in the
houses. One, indeed, attempted to assert his rights, but some one pumped
sixteen buckshot into him as he bent over a spring to drink, and he left
the country. They do tell of a late encounter between two rival foremen,
who rode on to each other in the w