Page:The man on horseback (IA manonhorseback00abdurich).pdf/19

Rh hobnobbed with such notorious characters of localNorthwestern history as Soapy Smith and Swiftwater Bill and who, well past three score and ten, white-haired, patriarchal, yet erect and lithe, had built himself a two-story cabin of logs neatly dovetailed, in the

heart of the bleak, frowning Hoodoos. It was surrounded by a flower garden, odorous with old-fashioned blossoms, and flanked by a nostalgic strawberry patch, shooting thin roots in fifteen inches of well-fertilized soil that he had carried in bags from the rolling Palouse and spread with loving hands on the narrow rock ledge that framed his cabin.

He still called himself a prospector, still was sure that some day he would strike it rich, and he was the partner of Tom Graves, half owner in the latter's prospect hole that was called grandiloquently the Yankee Doodle Glory and was the joke of every mining man from Seattle to the Idaho Panhandle.

Not that Tom Graves was a miner by profession.

He had been born thirty years earlier in the Palouse, had never been west of Spokane nor east of Butte, and had followed the range all his life. As a boy he had helped his father in a decade's hopeless fight against the sprouting of grain, the fencing of free land, and the nibbling of sharp-toothed sheep, afterwards riding herd to various cattle men, and finally becoming horse wrangler to Charles Nairn, the owner and manager of the Killicott ranch.

He was a typical Man on Horseback, an atavistic throwback to an earlier age when men rode free and large, and before steam and electricity and machinery came to cumber, some say to lighten, the world's burden. But he was not displeased when his friends referred to him as "the miner," or introduced him to traveling salesmen or visiting ranchers as the "King