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He saw the night scenes he had taken in town. He almost forgot that all this was his work, so smoothly did the story steal across his senses and beguile him into half believing it was true and not a fabric which he had built with careful planning and much toil. He saw the round-up scenes; the day-herd, the cutting-out and the branding, the beef-herd driven to the shipping cars.

In passing through the Indian Nation it is no uncommon thing for a band of Indians, all painted and varnished up, to ride down on a beef-herd, and, singling out the finest cattle in the bunch, compel the white owners of the stock to cut them out in a separate flock, when the Indians will gather around them and run them off.

And don't you take the beef-herd gait, neither." The malevolent look Boise Bill sent over his shoulder was wasted on Wallie who was picking out of the ashes and dusting the ham for which he had stood ready to shed his blood. The modest herring had been the foundation of the great Canby fortune.

Weary came back, laughing at the joke and fully expecting to see Pink a prisoner. When he saw how things stood, he said "Mamma mine!" and headed for camp on a run. The others deployed to search the range for a beef-herd, strayed, and with no tag for its prompt delivery. Weary crept into the bed-tent and got Chip by the shoulder. Chip sat up, instantly wide-awake.

When the train and beef-herd, with which Billy Cody had gone, arrived in the vicinity of old Fort Kearney their first serious adventure occurred, and for a while the boy thought of his mother's prediction, that he "would be killed or captured by Indians."

"What was good enough for them was good enough for him," he would announce at meal-time, in a snivelling tone, when the food happened to be particularly bad. He split the temporary outfit, brought together for the purpose of handling the beef-herd, into factions. He put the "XXX" in worse repute than it already enjoyedhe was, in fact, the discordant spirit of the expedition.

The beef-herd, that had been the pivotal point of the round-up and had made the mighty plain echo to its stampings and bellowings, beating up simooms that choked it with thirst, blinded it with dust, confounding itself on every side by the very fury of its blind force, had trailed for a week, tractable as toys in the hands of children.