ers
of our best western breeders. Indeed I have never known any foreign
greyhounds, whether Scotch, English, or from continental Europe, to
perform such feats of courage, endurance, and strength, in chasing and
killing dangerous game, as the homebred greyhounds of Colonel Williams.

CHAPTER IX.--IN COWBOY LAND.

Out on the frontier, and generally among those who spend their lives in,
or on the borders of, the wilderness, life is reduced to its elemental
conditions. The passions and emotions of these grim hunters of the
mountains, and wild rough-riders of the plains, are simpler and stranger
than those of people dwelling in more complicated states of society.
As soon as the communities become settled and begin to grow with any
rapidity, the American instinct for law asserts itself; but in the
earlier stages each individual is obliged to be a law to himself and to
guard his rights with a strong hand. Of course the transition periods
are full of incongruities. Men have not yet adjusted their relations to
morality and law with any niceness. They hold strongly by certain rude
virtues, and on the other hand they quite fail to recognize even
as shortcomings not a few traits that obtain scant mercy in older
communities. Many of the desperadoes, the man-killers, and road-agents
have good sides to their characters. Often they are people, who, in
certain stages of civilization, do, or have done, good work, but who,
when these stages have passed, find themselves surrounded by conditions
which accentuate their worst qualities, and make their best qualities
useless. The average desperado, for instance, has, after all, much the
same standard of morals that the Norman nobles had in the days of the
battle of Hastings, and, ethically and morally, he is decidedly in
advance of the vikings, who were the ancestors of these same nobles--and
to whom, by the way, he himself could doubtless trace a portion of
his blood. If the transition from the wild lawlessness of life in the
wilderness or on the border to a higher civilization were stretched
out over a term of centuries, he and his descendants would doubtless
accommodate themselves by degrees to the changing circumstances. But
unfortunately in the far West the transition takes place with marvellous
abruptness, and at an altogether unheard-of speed, and many a man's
nature is unable to change with sufficient rapidity to allow him to
harmonize with his environment. In consequence, unless