ranges. No one asks your name.
If driven by stress of conversation to something akin to it the
cowboy will say: "What may I call you, sir?" And he's as careful to
add the "sir," as he is to expect it in return.

You are at liberty to select what name you prefer. Where you hail
from? where going? why? are queries never put. To look at the brand
on your pony--you, a stranger--is a dangerous vulgarity to which no
gentleman of the Panhandle or any other region of pure southwestern
politeness would stoop. And if you wish to arouse an instant
combination of hate, suspicion and contempt in the bosom of a cowboy
you have but to stretch forth your artless Eastern hand and ask: "Let
me look at your gun."

Cowboys on the range or in the town are excessively clannish. They
never desert each other, but stay and fight and die and storm a jail
and shoot a sheriff if needs press, to rescue a comrade made captive
in their company. Also they care for each other when sick or
injured, and set one another's bones when broken in the falls and
tumbles of their craft. On the range the cowboy is quiet, just and
peaceable. There are neither women nor cards nor rum about the cow
camps. The ranches and the boys themselves banish the two latter;
and the first won't come. Women, cards and whiskey, the three war
causes of the West, are confined to the towns.

Those occasions when cattle are shipped and the beef-herds, per
consequence, driven to the shipping point become the only times when
the cowboy sees the town. In such hours he blooms and lives fully up
to his opportunity. He has travelled perhaps two hundred miles and
has been twenty days on the trail, for cattle may only be driven
about ten miles a day; he has been up day and night and slept half
the time in the saddle; he has made himself hoarse singing "Sam Bass"
and "The Dying Ranger" to keep the cattle quiet and stave off
stampedes; he has ridden ten ponies to shadows in his twenty days of
driving, wherefore, and naturally, your cowboy feels like relaxing.

There would be as many as ten men with each beef-herd; and the herd
would include about five thousand head. There would be six "riders,"
divided into three watches to stand night guard over the herd and
drive it through the day; there would be two "hoss hustlers," to hold
the eighty or ninety ponies, turn and turn about, and carry them
along with the herd; there would be the cook, with four mules and the
chuck wagon; a