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Updated: June 11, 2025
His own hat was on his head and had, in some manner, remained with him throughout all the excitement, but in his hand he was clutching, like grim death, a battered black Stetson. Turning the hat over, Hiram looked into the crown. The gilt letters, "U. H." met his eyes. "It's dad's hat," he gurgled. "Upton Hill, that's his name! I knew I had a bean on the right number!
He never came out on the veranda without glancing first of all at her grass house in the corner of the compound; and one evening, idly knocking the balls about on the billiard table, he came to himself to find himself standing staring at the nail upon which from the first she had hung her Stetson hat and her revolver-belt. Why should he care for her? he demanded of himself angrily.
All her old household goods were back in their places. There were some new ones too, for Lovell had supplied all that was lacking. The house was full of their old friends and neighbours. Mrs. Stetson welcomed them home again. "Oh, Tom," whispered Aunt Sally, tears of happiness streaming down her old face, "oh, Tom, isn't God good?"
There were days when Sheila's pony, a gift from Jim Greely, was led up earlier than the hour of Hudson's arrival, on which days Sheila, in a short skirt and a boy's shirt and a small felt Stetson, would ride away alone toward the mountain of her dreams. Sometimes Jim rode with her. It was not always possible to forbid him.
He had reasoned that it was only right and fitting that the slayer of a cowman should be slain by a cowman a code that held good in his time and would hold good now especially when the boys saw the battered Stetson, every line of which was mutely eloquent of its owner's individuality. Sundown drifted through the afternoon solitudes, his mind dulled by the monotony of the theme which obsessed him.
Then she stopped dead still and looked at Robert Grant Burns. "Oh, my goodness, I forgot to sob!" she gasped. And she caught her hat brim and pulling her Stetson more firmly down upon her head, turned and ran up the path to the house, and shut herself into her room.
Later, friends coming to the edge of the town for the bodies of the dead Lewallens confirmed it. A random ball had passed through old Lewallen's body in the wild flight for the woods, and during the night he had spent his last breath in a curse against the man who fired it. Then each Stetson, waked from his drunken sleep, drank again when he heard of the death.
Very earnestly he told how he had disrupted the dragon, and he described other events that happened down to the point where he found himself with the extra Stetson in his hand. "That hat," declared Hiram, "sure belonged to dad. I got it away from him somehow, and I hung to it all the while my wits was woolgatherin' and I was bein' toted to a drug store. Then I Say, what you laughin' at?"
I'll bet yuh my new Stetson to a two-bit piece, Buck, he rides in to town mighty quick to find out what Pop knows about it." Stratton did not take him up, for it had already occurred to him that such a move on Lynch's part was almost certain. As a matter of fact the foreman did leave the ranch early the next morning, driving a pair of blacks harnessed to the buckboard.
For a moment there was silence, while the idea took root. "I supposed he was dead long ago," remarked Stetson at last. "So did I, until a month ago until the last time I was in town stocking up. I met a fellow there then from the country west of the river, and it all came out. Blair's been stampin' that range for a year, and they're suspicious of him.
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