Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/213



was no organization, aggregation or collection by any name, in the country west of Dodge, as notable as Burnett's Cowboy Band. This band, numbering twenty-five or thirty, had been assembled by Burnett about a year before Dr. Hall's arrival in Damascus, as an expression of his importance which his own tongue and presence seemed insufficient to convey to the public appreciation. The most notable feature of the collection was the total absence of cowboys from the cast.

The leader of the band was the hardware merchant, a small Englishman with a brown-gray beard, whose name was Peters. He blew into a cornet with such spirit as to split the notes sometimes, making them high where they should have been low, but aside from that small fault of technique he was a most admirable musician, a sober man, with a family. He could go right ahead with his tune, afoot or ahorse, making the rest of them blow hard to keep up, and if he finished ahead of them, which he did frequently, it was nobody's business but his own.

That was one of the admirable things about the cowboy band: every fellow in it was so high-minded and independent that each of them pounded and puffed along according to his own gait. Off quite a distance, as one must stand to get the subject of a modern painting, one could identify a tune, or a fragment of a tune, now and