Master-stroke of Villainy 226

XVIII. Honor Among Thieves 240

XIX. The Bison 251

XX. The Mouth of Sage Creek 258

XXI. An Elemental Ally 271

XXII. Speechless Hicks 283

XXIII. The Spoils of War 294

XXIV. The Pipe of Peace 303

ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE

Hicks drew his and slapped me over the head with it, even as my
finger curled on the trigger Frontispiece 161

Bedded in the soft earth underneath lay the slim buckskin sacks 159

"There's been too much blood shed over that wretched gold already.
Let them have it" 212

A war for the open road against an enemy whose only weapon was
his unswerving bulk 256

RAW GOLD.

CHAPTER I.

THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW.

How many of us, I wonder, can look back over the misty, half-forgotten
years and not see a few that stand out clear and golden, sharp-cut
against the sky-line of memory? Years that we wish we could live again,
so that we might revel in every full-blooded hour. For we so seldom get
the proper focus on things until we look at them through the clarifying
telescope of Time; and then one realizes with a pang that he can't
back-track into the past and take his old place in the passing show.

Would we, if we could? It's an idle question, I know; wise men and musty
philosophers say that regrets are foolish. But I speak for myself only
when I say that I would gladly wheedle old, gray-bearded _Tempus_ into
making the wheels click backward till I could see again the
buffalo-herds darkening the green of Northwestern prairies. They and the
blanket Indian have passed, and the cowpuncher and Texas longhorns that
replaced them will soon be little more than a vivid memory. Already the
man with the plow is tearing up the brown sod that was a stamping-ground
for each in turn; the wheat-fields have doomed the sage-brush, and
truck-farms line the rivers where the wild cattle and the elk came down
to drink.

It w