ing-place frowned back at Death.

There was a day when every mining camp and cow-town from the Rio
Grande to the Yellowstone owned its boot-hill; a day when lone
graves marked the trails and solitary headboards rotted slowly in the
unpeopled wilderness. Many of these isolated wooden monuments fell
before the long assaults of the elements; the low mounds vanished
and the grass billowed in the wind hiding the last vestiges of the
leveled sepulchers. Sometimes the spot was favorable; outfits
rested there; new headboards rose about the first one; for the road
was long and weary, the fords were perilous from quicksands; thirst
lurked in the desert, and the Indians were always waiting. The camp
became a settlement, and in the days of its infancy, when there was
no law save that of might, the graveyard spread over a larger area.
There came an era when a member of that stern straight-shooting breed
who blazed the trails for the coming of the statutes wielded the
powers of high justice, the middle, and the low. Outlaw and rustler
opposed the dominion of this peace officer. Then the cemetery
boomed like the young town. Finally things settled down to jury
trials and men let lawyers do most of the fighting with forensics
instead of forty-fives. Churches were built and school-houses; a new
graveyard was established; brush and weeds hid the old one's
leaning headboards. Time passed; a city grew; the boot-hill was
forgotten.

This is a chronicle of men whose bones lie in those vanished
boot-hills. If one could stand aside on the day of judgment and watch
them pass when the brazen notes of the last trump are growing fainter,
he would witness a brave procession. But we at least can marshal the
shadowy host from fast waning memories and, looking upon some of their
number, recall the deeds they did, the manner of their dying.

Here then they come through the curtain of time's mists, Indian
fighter, town marshal, faro-dealer, and cow-boy. There are a few among
them upon whom it is not worth while to gaze, those whose lives and
deaths were unfit for recording; there are a vast multitude whose
heroic stories were never told and never will be; and there are some
whose deeds as they have come down from the lips of the old-timers
should never die.

Thus in the forefront pass lean forms clad for the most part in
garments fringed with buckskin. You can see where some have torn off
portions of the fringes to clean their rifles.

Old-fashion