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This was not of much consequence then, however, as we still had plenty of room. The first man was killed the morning after the Dead-Line was put up. The victim was a German, wearing the white crescent of the Second Division of the Eleventh Corps, whom we had nicknamed "Sigel." Hardship and exposure had crazed him, and brought on a severe attack of St. Vitus's dance.
If the years of a man's life are three-score-and-ten let us determine to move the dead-line on to seventy, and claim that we are not old until we have reached that point. And if, by reason of strength we can hold on to four-score, let us push it on the ten years farther, and, taking courage, thank God for this new lease of life.
Graze your cattle up around Hackberry Grove, and keep a dead-line fully three miles wide between the wintered and through trail herds. Any new cattle that you pick up, cripples or strays, hold them down the creek between here and the old trail crossing. For fear of losing them you can't even keep milk cows around the ranch, so turn out your calves. Don't ask me to explain Texas fever.
There was a dead-line for hats beyond which no gentleman would venture, for, after a hat had once blown beyond the town limits it was no longer a maverick and subject to branding, but on the other hand was the absolute, undeniable and legal property of Donna Corblay. So much for the hats. As for the ranch itself, it wasn't, properly speaking, a ranch at all.
They destroy your own coolness and confidence, and they excite the enemy an inch nearer to that dead-line of the lust of fighting, beyond which prudence gives place to the fury of killing. An Indian is the most cautious and wily of fighters before he goes mad: and the most terribly reckless after.
The boys were left alone for the first time in several nights. The rush of the past few days had kept them in the saddle during their waking hours. The dead-line had been neglected, the drifting of cripples to the new tanks below was pressing, and order must be established. The water in the pools was the main concern, a thing beyond human control, and a matter of constant watchfulness.
About noon the thick forest of great pine trees ceased as suddenly as if nature had drawn a dead-line about the brow of the mountain. A foot above it was nothing but stunted oak growths and tufts of bunch-grass large as the top of a palm-tree.
"When did you go to the house last, Steve?" Steve reflected. "About a couple of weeks ago, I reckon." "See the kid?" Steve shook his head. "Seeing his nibs ain't my long suit these days. I may be wrong, but I got the idea there was a dead-line for me about three blocks away from the nursery.
That was it impossible, literally impossible, for his whole being was in revolt. The threshold of the door might have been a dead-line; he was unable to cross it, at any rate. With a stony aspect he watched her depart and wave a hand back at him from a distance and at last disappear.
Well, they didn't know how bad things were, and I couldn't go to them with the truth and make them a present of my helpless, incompetent self. And so for the last two years I've been sticking it out in a hall bedroom, just west of the dead-line. I have a life membership in the club what a Christmas present that has turned out to be! and twice in the week I dine there.
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