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 prospering on cattle. But for cattle they would not have been there at all.

Peace generally prevailed between railroad and range, although an outbreak came now and then. There was no public dance hall in McPacken, that being an institution belonging to the days before the town's beginning, but there was a big saloon with its three beerjerkers on busy nights and Sundays, where the soil was always raked for the seeds of trouble.

It was the custom still to carry guns on the range in those days, a habit that had become a tradition, rather than a necessity. The railroaders, with few exceptions, stuck pistols in their hip pockets when going out for the evening. Railroad taste favored that style of weapon known as bulldog, on account of its short and chunky build being adapted to gentlemanly concealment. It was considered boorish in railroad society to make a show of one's weapon, but there were men enough with guns stuck around them in McPacken every night to line up a considerable battle. That such general engagement between railroad and range never had taken place was the marvel of all peaceable citizens.

There were staid and respectable railroad men who had their families and homes in McPacken, who neither mingled in the swilling nor mixed in the barroom brawls, forerunners of the substantial respectability that railroad men, as a class, came in time to enjoy. In those days, especially out on the edge of things as in McPacken, a railroader was a man with a reputation for roughness, a notoriety that he fully enjoyed and