Page:The Trail Rider (1924).pdf/14

 upward of eighteen years, a circumstance that vexed him and hurt his pride. He deplored the immorality of a society in which women laughed at long, white whiskers, and swore in the same breath that if matrimony demanded the sacrifice of them he would march on to the grave a single man. No woman in the world was worth it.

While he waited in hope for the reformation of society, Uncle Boley supplemented his pension by the manufacture of boots for the cowboys and cattlemen, who were thick on the Arkansas Valley range of Kansas in those early days. His shop was no larger than the front room of his little house in Cottonwood, and that was not much bigger than a bedstead; his only machinery the primitive tools of the bench-worker at his trade.

He had followed the frontier from Westport, on the Missouri line, where he began in the old freighting days, and had brought up in Cottonwood for his last stand. His fame as a contriver of high heels and quilted tops reached as far as New Mexico, borne up and down the cattle world by the far-riding vaqueros, who held him in the first esteem.

In those days Cottonwood was not so much of a town as in time it grew to be, for it was only the beginning, indefinite and broad-sown on the treeless prairie beside the sandy stream. There had