n to take exception to, I am sure to be due
for a mix-up I can very well get on without.

From 1878 to 1880 Billy Lykins was one of the most efficient inspectors
of the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association, a short man of heavy
muscular physique and a round, cherubic, pink and white face, in which
a pair of steel-blue glittering eyes looked strangely out of place. A
second glance, however, showed behind the smiling mouth a set of the
jaw that did not belie the fighting eyes. So far as I can now recall,
Billy never failed to get what he went after while he remained in our
employ.

Probably the toughest customer Billy ever tackled was Doc Middleton.
As an outlaw, Doc was the victim of an error of judgment. When he
first came among us, hailing from Llano County, Texas, Doc was as fine
a puncher and jolly, good-tempered range-mate as any in the Territory.
Sober and industrious, he never drank or gambled. But he had his bit
of temper, had Doc, and his chunk of good old Llano nerve. Thus, when
a group of carousing soldiers, in a Sidney saloon, one night lit in to
beat Doc up with their six-shooters for refusing to drink with them,
the inevitable happened in a very few seconds; Doc killed three of
them, jumped his horse, and split the wind for the Platte.

And therein lay his error.

The killing was perfectly justifiable; surrendered and tried, he would
surely have been acquitted. But his breed never surrender, at least,
never before their last shell is emptied. Flight having made him an
outlaw, the Government offered a heavy reward for him, dead or alive.
For a time he was harbored among his friends on the different ranches;
indeed was a welcome guest of my Deadman Ranch for several days; but in
a few weeks the hue and cry got so hot that he had to jump for the Sand
Hills south of the Niobrara.

Ever pursued, he found that honest wage-earning was impossible.
Presently he was confronted with want, not of much, indeed of very
little, but that want was vital--he wanted cartridges. At this time
the Sand Hills were full of deer and antelope; and therefore to him
cartridges meant more even than defence of his freedom, they meant
food. It was this want that drove him into his first actual crime, the
stealing of Sioux ponies, which he ran into the settlements and sold.

The downward path of the criminal is like that of the limpid,
clean-faced brook, bred of a bubbling spring nestled in some shady nook
of the hills, wher