XX Love and Death 268
XXI The Man in the Door 280
XXII Paid 298
XXIII Tears in the Night 303
XXIV Banjo Faces Into the West 312
XXV "Hasta Luego" 322

THE RUSTLER OF WIND RIVER

CHAPTER I

STRANGE BARGAININGS

When a man came down out of the mountains looking dusty and gaunt as
the stranger did, there was no marvel in the matter of his eating five
cans of cove oysters. The one unaccountable thing about it was that
Saul Chadron, president of the Drovers' Association, should sit there
at the table and urge the lank, lean starveling to go his limit.

Usually Saul Chadron was a man who picked his companions, and was a
particular hand at the choosing. He could afford to do that, being of
the earth's exalted in the Northwest, where people came to him and put
down their tribute at his feet.

This stranger, whom Chadron treated like a long-wandering friend, had
come down the mountain trail that morning, and had been hanging about
the hotel all day. Buck Snellin, the proprietor--duly licensed for a
matter of thirty years past by the United States government to conduct
his hostelry in the corner of the Indian reservation, up against the
door of the army post--did not know him. That threw him among
strangers in that land, indeed, for Buck knew everybody within a
hundred miles on every side.

The stranger was a tall, smoky man, hollow-faced, grim; adorned with a
large brown mustache which drooped over his thin mouth; a bony man
with sharp shoulders, and a stoop which began in the region of the
stomach, as if induced by drawing in upon himself in times of poignant
hunger, which he must have felt frequently in his day to wear him down
to that state of bones; with the under lid of his left eye caught at a
point and drawn down until it showed red, as if held by a fishhook to
drain it of unimaginable tears.

There was a furtive look in his restless, wild-animal eyes, smoky like
the rest of him, and a surliness about his long, high-ridged nose
which came down over his mustache like a beak. He wore a cloth cap
with ear flaps, and they were down, although the heat of summer still
made the September air lively enough for one with blood beneath his
sk