The Wife of Chino
A Bargain with Peg-Leg
The Passing of Cock-Eye Blacklock
A Memorandum of Sudden Death
Two Hearts That Beat as One
The Dual Personality of Slick Dick Nickerson
The Ship That Saw a Ghost
The Ghost in the Crosstrees
The Riding of Felipe
“‘Sell a Thousand May at One-Fifty,’
Vociferated the Bear Broker”
Caught in the Circle. The last stand of three
troopers and a scout overtaken by a band of hostile
Indians.
“’Ere’s ’Ell to Pay!”
“‘My Curse Is on Her Who Next Kisses You’”
I. THE BEAR—WHEAT AT SIXTY-TWO
As Sam Lewiston backed the horse into the shafts of
his backboard and began hitching the tugs to the whiffletree,
his wife came out from the kitchen door of the house
and drew near, and stood for some time at the horse’s
head, her arms folded and her apron rolled around them.
For a long moment neither spoke. They had talked
over the situation so long and so comprehensively
the night before that there seemed to be nothing more
to say.
The time was late in the summer, the place a ranch
in southwestern Kansas, and Lewiston and his wife
were two of a vast population of farmers, wheat growers,
who at that moment were passing through a crisis—a
crisis that at any moment might culminate in tragedy.
Wheat was down to sixty-six.
At length Emma Lewiston spoke.
“Well,” she hazarded, looking vaguely
out across the ranch toward the horizon, leagues distant;
“well, Sam, there’s always that offer of
brother Joe’s. We can quit—and
go to Chicago—if the worst comes.”
“And give up!” exclaimed Lewiston, running
the lines through the torets. “Leave the
ranch! Give up! After all these years!”
His wife made no reply for the moment. Lewiston
climbed into the buckboard and gathered up the lines.
“Well, here goes for the last try, Emmie,”
he said. “Good-by, girl. Maybe things
will look better in town to-day.”
“Maybe,” she said gravely. She kissed
her husband good-by and stood for some time looking
after the buckboard traveling toward the town in a
moving pillar of dust.
“I don’t know,” she murmured at
length; “I don’t know just how we’re
going to make out.”
When he reached town, Lewiston tied the horse to the
iron railing in front of the Odd Fellows’ Hall,
the ground floor of which was occupied by the post-office,
and went across the street and up the stairway of a
building of brick and granite—quite the
most pretentious structure of the town—and
knocked at a door upon the first landing. The
door was furnished with a pane of frosted glass, on
which, in gold letters, was inscribed, “Bridges
& Co., Grain Dealers.”
