hat he could not remain idle during the winter. He could
have had plenty to do at home, working without wages, but that was no
longer to be thought of. So he decided to join two other adventurous
cowboys who had planned to go south, and in the spring come back with
some of the great herds being driven north.

But Pan liked the vast ranges of the Lone Star State, and he rode there
for two years, inevitably drifting into the wild free life of the
cowboys. Sometimes he sent money home to his mother, but that was
seldom, because he was always in debt. She wrote him regularly, which
fact was the only link between him and the old home memories. Thought
of Lucy returned now and then, on the lonely rides on night watches,
and it seemed like a sweet melancholy dream. Never a word did he hear
of her.

Spring had come again when he rode into the Panhandle, and as luck
would have it he fell in with an outfit who were driving cattle to
Montana, a job that would take until late fall. To his chagrin stories
of his wildness had preceded him. Ill rumor travels swiftly. Pan was
the more liked and respected by these riders. But he feared that
gossip of the southern ranges would reach his mother. He would go home
that fall to reassure her of his well-being, and that he was not one of
those "bad, gun-throwing cowboys."

But late fall found him cheated of his long summer's wages, without
money and job. He would not ride a "grub line" home, so he found a
place with a rancher in Montana. He learned to hate the bleak ranges
of that northern state, the piercing blasts of wind, the ice and snow.
Spring saw him riding south toward his old stamping grounds. But
always he was drifting, with the swift months flying by as fleet as the
mustangs he rode, and he did not reach home. The Cimarron, the Platte,
the Arkansas ranges came to know the tracks of his horses; and after he
had drifted on, to remember him as few cowboys were remembered.

At twenty years of age Panhandle Smith looked older--looked the hard
life, the hard fare, the hard companionship that had been his lot as an
American cowboy. He had absorbed all the virtues of that remarkable
character, and most of the vices. But he had always kept aloof from
women. His comrades gave many forceful and humorous reasons for his
apparent fear of the sex, but they never understood him. Pan never
lost the reverence for women his mother had instilled in him, nor his
first and only lo