Wyoming | Page 3

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Etext scanned by Mary Starr of Glendale, CA.

WYOMING
A STORY OF THE OUTDOOR WEST
by William MacLeod Raine

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. A DESERT MEETING 2. THE KING OF THE BIG HORN
COUNTRY 3. AN INVITATION GIVEN AND ACCEPTED 4. AT
THE LAZY D RANCH 5. THE DANCE AT FRASER'S 6. A PARTY
CALL 7. THE MAN FROM THE SHOSHONE FASTNESSES 8. IN
THE LAZY D HOSPITAL 9. A RESCUE 12. MISTRESS AND
MAID 13. THE TWO COUSINS 14. FOR THE WORLD'S
CHAMPIONSHIP 15. JUDD MORGAN PASSES 16. HUNTING BIG
GAME 17. RUN TO EARTH 18. PLAYING FOR TIME 19. WEST
POINT TO THE RESCUE 20. TWO CASES OF DISCIPLINE 21.
THE SIGNAL LIGHTS 22. EXIT THE KING 23. JOURNEYS END
IN LOVERS' MEETING.

CHAPTER 1
. A DESERT MEETING
An automobile shot out from a gash in the hills and slipped swiftly
down to the butte. Here it came to a halt on the white, dusty road, while
its occupant gazed with eager, unsated eyes on the great panorama that
stretched before her. The earth rolled in waves like a mighty sea to the
distant horizon line. From a wonderful blue sky poured down upon the
land a bath of sunbeat. The air was like wine, pure and strong, and
above the desert swam the rare, untempered light of Wyoming. Surely
here was a peace primeval, a silence unbroken since the birth of
creation.
It was all new to her, and wonderfully exhilarating. The infinite roll of
plain, the distant shining mountains, the multitudinous voices of the

desert drowned in a sunlit sea of space--they were all details of the
situation that ministered to a large serenity.
And while she breathed deeply the satisfaction of it, an exploding rifle
echo shattered the stillness. With excited sputtering came the prompt
answer of a fusillade. She was new to the West; but some instinct
stronger than reason told the girl that here was no playful puncher
shooting up the scenery to ventilate his exuberance. Her imagination
conceived something more deadly; a sinister picture of men pumping
lead in a grim, close-lipped silence; a lusty plainsman, with murder in
his heart, crumpling into a lifeless heap, while the thin smoke-spiral
curled from his hot rifle.
So the girl imagined the scene as she ran swiftly forward through the
pines to the edge of the butte bluff whence she might look down upon
the coulee that nestled against it. Nor had she greatly erred, for her first
sweeping glance showed her the thing she had dreaded.
In a semicircle, well back from the foot of the butte, half a dozen men
crouched in the cover of the sage-brush and a scattered group of
cottonwoods. They were perhaps fifty yards apart, and the attention of
all of them was focused on a spot directly beneath her. Even as she
looked, in that first swift moment