Then he took the centre of the ring, and bellowed
a chant of victory in a fuller voice than he had given before, while
the other brutes, gathered by the fence, looked at him in stupefaction.
Only once more did Billy Buck figure in history before he left us for a
larger field in town, and on this occasion, for the first and last time
in his career, he got the worst of it.
A lone Injun came to the ranch--a very tall, grave man, clad in
comic-picture clothes. A battered high hat surmounted his block of
midnight hair, and a cutaway coat, built for a man much smaller around
the chest, held his torso in bondage. As it was warm on the day he
arrived, he had discarded his trousers--a breech-clout was plenty
leg-gear, he thought. He bore a letter of recommendation from a white
friend.
"Plenty good letter--_leela ouashtay ota_," said he, as he handed the
missive over. I read it aloud for the benefit of the assembled ranch.
It ran:
"This is Jimmy-hit-the-bottle, the worst specimen of a bad tribe. He
will steal anything he can lift. If he knew there was such a thing as
a cemetery, he'd walk fifty miles to rob it. Any citizen wishing to do
his country a service will kindly hit him on the head with an axe.
"JACK FORSYTHE."
"Plenty good letter--_ota_!" cried the Injun, his face beaming with
pride.
[Illustration: "Jimmy-hit-the-bottle"]
I coughed, and said it was indeed vigorous; Steve and the boys fled the
scene.
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