Bucky OConnor | Page 3

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Scanned by Mary Starr of Glendale, California.

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 with easy good nature, making himself at home in Section 4. "Tell the company to send in its bill. No use jawing about it."
"You'll have to get off, sir."
"That's right--at Tucson."
"No, sir. You'll have to get off here. I have no authority to let you ride."
"Didn't I hear you say the train was late? Don't you think you'd arrive earlier at the end of your run if your choo-choo got to puffing?"
"You'll have to get off, sir."
"I hate to disoblige," murmured the owner of the jingling spurs,