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 there while Peter Nearing, her paw, was alive. He was the one white cowman I've ever knew."

No pursuit developed to trouble the friends as they rode their way, Jogging at considerably sharper pace than Barrett and Nearing had covered the same ground but a few days before. Fred Grubb was as light in the saddle as a leaf, as much a part of his horse as the best cowboy on the range. Barrett often had wondered why he never had advanced from wrangler to the better paid, more respected pursuit. He felt that he knew the poet well enough now, considering the latter's confidences, to ask him as they rode through the waning day.

"Well sir," said Fred, in his oratorical manner of prefacing even the most trivial matters, "it was because I never had the guts in me to sock a redhot iron up agin the silk-soft hide of a little calf."

"That would be an ordeal for a poet," Barrett agreed, wondering how he, himself, would have come up to this trial if his education on the range had progressed that far.

"A man hardens to it gradual, they say," Fred went on, "seein' it done, seein' it done, smellin' the burnt hair and fried livin' flesh, but it never was in me to set like cement to the sufferin's of any creature the Poet Lariat of this here universe ever turned loose in the world."

"I believe you, old feller."

"I will take my gun and kill a bird or beast I want to eat, end 'em sudden and humane, and that's all right; I'll straddle the wildest outlaw bronco that ever busted the lights out of a man, and I'm here to tell you,