self does the sage-brush seem when revisited, that you wait for
the horseman to appear.

But he will never come again. He rides in his historic yesterday.
You will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence
than you will see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing
from Palos with his caravels.

And yet the horseman is still so near our day that in some
chapters of this book, which were published separate at the close
of the nineteenth century, the present tense was used. It is true
no longer. In those chapters it has been changed, and verbs like
"is" and "have" now read "was" and "had." Time has flowed faster
than my ink.

What is become of the horseman, the cowpuncher, the last romantic
figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he
did with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the
wages that he squandered were squandered hard,--half a year's pay
sometimes gone in a night,--"blown in," as he expressed it, or
"blowed in," to be perfectly accurate. Well, he will be here
among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play
as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since
the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero without
wings.

The cow-puncher's ungoverned hours did not unman him. If he gave
his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the
times. Nor did he talk lewdly to women; Newport would have
thought him old-fashioned. He and his brief epoch make a complete