It was an incident of the Cattle Trail, that most unique and
stupendous of all modern migrations, and its founders must have been
inspired with a malicious desire to perpetrate a crime against
geography, or else they reveled in a perverse cussedness, for within a
mile on every side lay broad prairies, and two miles to the east
flowed the indolent waters of the Rio Pecos itself. The distance
separating the town from the river was excusable, for at certain
seasons of the year the placid stream swelled mightily and swept down
in a broad expanse of turbulent, yellow flood.

Buckskin was a town of one hundred inhabitants, located in the
valley of the Rio Pecos fifty miles south of the Texas-New Mexico
line. The census claimed two hundred, but it was a well-known fact
that it was exaggerated. One instance of this is shown by the name of
Tom Flynn. Those who once knew Tom Flynn, alias Johnny Redmond, alias
Bill Sweeney, alias Chuck Mullen, by all four names, could find them
in the census list. Furthermore, he had been shot and killed in the
March of the year preceding the census, and now occupied a grave in
the young but flourishing cemetery. Perry's Bend, twenty miles up the
river, was cognizant of this and other facts, and, laughing in open
derision at the padded list, claimed to be the better town in all
ways, including marksmanship.

One year before this tale opens, Buck Peters, an example for the
more recent Billy the Kid, had paid Perry's Bend a short but busy
visit. He had ridden in at the north end of Main Street and out at the
south. As he came in he was fired at by a group of ugly cowboys from a
ranch known as the C 80. He was hit twice, but he unlimbered his
artillery, and before his horse had carried him, half dead, out on the