CHAPTER XX
JOAN
"Them were the days when this was a man's country, which a man could
climb on his hoss with a gun and a rope and touch heaven and hell in one
day's ridin'. Them good old days ain't no more. I've heard the old man
tell about 'em. Now they've got everybody stamped and branded with law
an' order, herded together like cattle, ticketed, done for. That's the
way the range is now. The marshals have us by the throat. In the old
days a sheriff that outlived his term was probably crooked and runnin'
hand in hand with the long-riders."
"Long-riders?" queried Bard.
"Fellers that got tired of workin' and took to ridin' for their livin'.
Mostly they worked in little gangs of five and six. They was called
long-riders, I guess, partly because they was in the saddle all the
time, and partly because they done their jobs so far apart. They'd ride
into Eldara and blow up the safe in the bank one day, for instance, and
five days later they'd be two hundred and fifty miles away stoppin' a
train at Lewis Station.
"They never hung around no one part of the country and that made it hard
as hell to run 'em down--that and because they had the best hosses that
money could buy.
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