. That night the shack burned to the
ground, the orchard was ruined and the boy disappeared. Some people said
that the kid took what he wanted and burned the house rather than to
have it profaned as a range house by the curs who murdered his dad; and
some said the other thing, but from what I know of the kid, I reckon he
did it himself.

"Right there and then things began to happen that hurt the ease and safety
of the Gridiron Circle. Cows were found dead all over the range--juglars
cut in every case. Three of their punchers were found dead in one
week--a .5O-caliber Sharps had done it. A regular reign of terror began
and kept the outfit on the nervous jump all the time. They searched and
trailed and searched and swore, and if one of them went off by himself
he was usually ready to be buried. Ten experienced, old-time cowmen were
made fools of by a fifteen-year-old kid, who was never seen by anybody
that lived long enough to tell about it. When he got hungry, he just
killed another cow and had a porterhouse steak cooked between two others
over a good fire. He ate the middle steak, which had all the juices of
the two burned ones, and threw the others away. Three meals a day for six
months, and one cow to a meal, was the order of things on the ranges of
the Gridiron Circle. He had plenty of ammunition, because every dead
puncher was minus his belt when found and his guns were broken or gone;
and early in the game the boy had made a master stroke: he raided the
storehouse of the ranch one night and lugged away about five hundred
rounds of ammunition in his saddle bags, with a couple of spare Colts and
a repeating Winchester of the latest pattern, and he spoiled all the
rest of the guns he could lay his hands on. Humorous kid, wasn't he,
shooting up the ranch with its own guns and cartridges?

"Finally, however, after the news had spread, which it did real quick, a
regular lynching party was arranged, and the U-B, which lay about sixty
miles to the east, sent over half a dozen men to take a hand. Then the
Gridiron Circle had a rest, but while the gang was hunting for him and
laying all sorts of elaborate traps to catch him, the boy was over on
the U-B, showing it how foolish it had been to take up another man's
quarrel. By this time the whole country knew about it, and even some
Eastern papers began to give it much attention. One of the punchers of
the Gridiron Circle, when he found a friend dead and saw the tracks of
the