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 pointment and hard times than his high pride ever would permit his tongue to utter in words.

How he came to be so entirely strapped at that time, and what had led up to the condition, Simpson did not explain. Coburn let that alone, not out of delicacy or sympathy, but because he knew quite well how far a man ought to go in certain affairs without laying himself open to being told where to get off. Tom Simpson was a man who would not hesitate to put an impertinent fellow in his place; Coburn could see that without any kind of glasses at all.

Coburn had his measure, at any rate, and was satisfied with the result. Young Englishmen of that type were not scarce on the range in those days, when a great deal of British capital was invested in the big cattle companies. Young fellows who had been wild, most of them, sent over to the cattle range where they might blow off their spirits without further compromising the folks at home. It was a long distance between the cattle ranges and England, and what would be naughty, naughty conduct in the standards of the older land was accepted as only the natural expression of lively young manhood in the new.

They got money from home every three months, most of these young chaps, burned a big red streak with it while it lasted, and took their hardships between remittances like the real men they were at foundation. Some of them made good to sensational degree; Coburn knew of some in the Panhandle country of Texas, where he had got his own start as a cowpuncher, who had enough silver dishes on their tables to found a mint. Quiet-spoken men, too, like this Tom Simpson; educated men from old col-