wilful and docile by turns, ceaselessly active, eternally discontented,
seeking they knew not what, they were their own evil genius; as
certainly as nature surrounded them with Heaven, they supplied their own
Hell and, impartial, chose from each to weave the web of their lives.

Of this period, life of this life, was Colonel William Landor; colonel
no longer, plain Bill, from the river to the Hills, husband these ten
years now, but not father, Cattle King of an uncontested range. Of this
life likewise, bred in it, saturated in it, was a dark young woman, his
adopted daughter, two years past her majority, Elizabeth Rowland Landor
by name. Of it most vitally of all, born of it, rooted in it through
unknown centuries of ancestral domicile, was a copper-brown young man,
destitute as a boy of twelve of a trace of beard, black as a prairie
crow of hair and eyes, deep-lunged like a race-track thoroughbred, wiry
as a mustang, garbed as a white man, but bearing the liquid name of a
Teton Sioux, "Ma-wa-cha-sa, the lost pappoose," yet known wherever the
Santee Massacre and the tale of his appearance was known, as "How"
Landor. Of this period, last of all, was the great B.B.--Buffalo
Butte--ranch, giant among the giants, whose brand was familiar as his
own name to every cowboy west of the Missouri, whose hospitable ranch
house, twenty-odd miles from the vest pocket metropolis of Coyote
Centre, which in turn, to quote Landor himself, was "a hundred miles
from nowhere," was the Mecca of every traveller whom chance drew into
this wild, of every curious tenderfoot seeking a glimpse of the reverse
side of the coin of life, of every desperate "one lunger," who, with
gambler instinct, staked his all on prairie sun and prairie air.