Bucky OConnor | Page 3

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Bucky O'Connor A Tale of the Unfenced Border
by William MacLeod Raine

To My Brother
EDGAR C. RAINE
MY DEAR WANDERER:
I write your name on this page that you may know we hold you not less
in our thoughts because you have heard and answered again the call of
the frozen North, have for the time disappeared, swallowed in some of
its untrodden wilds. As in those old days of 59 Below On Bonanza, the
long Winter night will be of interminable length. Armed with this note
of introduction then, Bucky O'Connor offers himself, with the best bow
of one Adventurer to another, as a companion to while away some few
of those lonely hours.
March, 1910, Denver.

BUCKY O'CONNOR
CONTENTS
1. Enter "Bear-Trap" Collins 2. Taxation Without Representation 3.
The Sheriff Introduces Himself 4. A Bluff is Called 5. Bucky
Entertains 6. Bucky Makes a Discovery 7. In the Land of Revolutions 8.

First Blood! 9. "Adore Has Only One D" 10. The Hold-Up of the M. C.
P. Flyer 11. "Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make" 12. A Clean White
Man's Option 13. Bucky's First-Rate Reasons 14. Le Roi Est Mort;
Vive Le Roi 15. In the Secret Chamber 16. Juan Valdez Scores 17.
Hidden Valley 18. A Dinner for Three 19. A Villon of the Desert 20.
Back to God's Country 21. The Wolf Pack 22. For a Good Reason
CHAPTER 1.
ENTER "BEAR-TRAP" COLLINS
She had been aware of him from the moment of his spectacular
entrance, though no slightest sign of interest manifested itself in her
indolent, incurious eyes. Indeed, his abundant and picturesque area was
so vivid that it would have been difficult not to feel his presence
anywhere, let alone on a journey so monotonous as this was proving to
be.
It had been at a water-tank, near Socorro, that the Limited, churning
furiously through brown Arizona in pursuit of a lost half-hour, jarred to
a sudden halt that shook sleep from the drowsy eyes of bored
passengers. Through the window of her Pullman the young woman in
Section 3 had glimpsed a bevy of angry train officials eddying around a
sturdy figure in the center, whose strong, lean head rose confidently
above the press. There was the momentary whirl of a scuffle, out of the
tangle of which shot a brakeman as if propelled from a catapult. The
circle parted, brushed aside by a pair of lean shoulders, muscular and
broad. Yet a few moments and the owner of the shoulders led down the
aisle to the vacant section opposite her a procession whose tail was
composed of protesting trainmen.
"You had no right to flag the train, Sheriff Collins, and you'll have to
get off; that's all there is to it," the conductor was explaining testily.
"Oh, that's all right," returned the offender