The Rustler of Wind River

This is a story book. When a man came down out of the mountains looking dusty and gaunt as the stranger did, there was no marvel in the matter of his eating five cans of cove oysters. The one unaccountable thing about it was that Saul Chadron, president of the Drovers’ Association, should sit there at the table and urge the lank, lean starveling to go his limit. Usually Saul Chadron was a man who picked his companions, and was a particular hand at the choosing. He could afford to do that, being of the earth’s exalted in the Northwest, where people came to him and put down their tribute at his feet. This stranger, whom Chadron treated like a long-wandering friend, had come down the mountain trail that morning, and had been hanging about the hotel all day. Buck Snellin, the proprietor—duly licensed for a matter of thirty years past by the United States government to conduct his hostelry in the corner of the Indian reservation, up against the door of the army post—did not know him. That threw him among strangers in that land, indeed, for Buck knew everybody within a hundred miles on every side. The stranger was a tall, smoky man, hollow-faced, grim; adorned with a large brown mustache which drooped over his thin mouth; a bony man with sharp shoulders, and a stoop which began in the region of the stomach, as if induced by drawing in upon himself in times of poignant hunger, which he must have felt frequently in his day to wear him down to that state of bones; with the under lid of his left eye caught at a point and drawn down until it showed red, as if held by a fishhook to drain it of unimaginable tears.