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[Illustration: The Crack of the Winchester.]




THE SUNSET TRAIL

By

ALFRED HENRY LEWIS

Author of "The Boss," "The President," "Wolfville Days,"
"Black Lion Inn," "Peggy O'Neal," etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

A. L. BURT COMPANY, Publishers

New York




Copyright. 1905 BY A. S. BARNES & CO.

Published April, 1905

Second Printing July, 1905

Third Printing January, 1906

Fourth Printing July, 1906




To William Barclay Masterson

This Volume Is Inscribed

By His Friend

The Author




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I--HOW IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT
  CHAPTER II--THAT TRANSACTION IN PONIES
  CHAPTER III--INEZ OF THE 'DOBE WALLS
  CHAPTER IV--THE WILD ROSE OF THE CANADIAN
  CHAPTER V--THE STRATEGY OF MR. MASTERSON
  CHAPTER VI--THE FATAL GRATITUDE OF MR. KELLY
  CHAPTER VII--WHY THE WEEKLY PLANET DIED
  CHAPTER VIII--AN INVASION OF DODGE
  CHAPTER IX--THE MEDICINE OF LONE WOLF
  CHAPTER X--THE INTUITIONS OF MR. ALLISON
  CHAPTER XI--HOW TRUE LOVE RAN IN DODGE
  CHAPTER XII--DIPLOMACY IN DODGE
  CHAPTER XIII--THE RESCUE OF CIMARRON BILL
  CHAPTER XIV--THE WORRIES OF MR. HOLIDAY
  CHAPTER XV--HOW MR. HICKOK WENT INTO CHEYENNE
  CHAPTER XVI--THE LAST VISIT TO DODGE




INTRODUCTION.

It was in my thoughts, as I wrote these chapters and arranged their
sequence, to fix in types a phase of American existence that, within the
touch of present time, has passed away. The West has witnessed more
changes than has the East. The common impression, and one to which all
Americans are bred, leaves paleface Western occupation to a modern day.
Whenever one's thought wanders to what is old in this country one
inevitably sets his face towards the East.

None the less, this feeling of an Eastern as an earlier settlement is
error. In New Mexico and Arizona, while exploring an ancient Spanish
church or considering some palace of sun-dried mud with a
sixteenth-century origin, it will begin to press upon one how the East,
after all, is but the younger theatre of European endeavour in this
continent. Also, an odd feeling will grow, as one reflects that more
than a half century before Winthrop and Standish and Bradford and Alden
and those other stern and solemn ones, came ashore on Plymouth Rock,
Santa Fe was a bustling capital--a centre of agriculture, of mining, of
flocks and of herds.

St. Augustine is said to be the first founded town within the frontiers
of this country, as the same are made and laid to-day. And yet it is in
warm dispute, with a deal to tell on the New Mexican side of the
question, if Santa Fe be not the age equal of her sister of the
Everglades. Certainly, and say the most disappointing thing for Santa
Fe, there was a no greater space than two or three years to fall
between.

Considered as regions, Florida versus New Mexico, the latter should be
the older. In its settlement, that stretch lying between Santa Fe and
San Francisco, and south to the Rio Grande and the now North Mexican
line, was in a fairly populous and flourishing condition three centuries
and more ago. To say "New Mexico" or "Arizona" hath a far-off savage
sound, and yet both were dominated of European influences and
polka-dotted with many a white man's town long years before Salem went
hanging her witches or Pocahontas interfered to save the life of Smith.
It was over three and one-half centuries ago that Coronado ransacked
Colorado and Kansas for those "seven cities" and the gold he could not
find.

In 1803 the first American trading expedition broke across the plains
and entered Santa Fe. The expedition was planned by William Morrison,
the grandfather of that Colonel William Morrison who, following Civil
War, won fame as a House leader, and proposed to reform the tariff by
horizontally reducing it. Until the Morrison trade invasion of New
Mexico, the West in its European complexion had been furnished by the
Spanish. Also, about this time the English and Scotch, with the Canadian
French to aid them, came pushing southward and westward from British
Columbia in a search for furs.

The fur trade grew apace. Beavers were first the purpose, then
buffaloes, with such peltry folk as bears and wolves and foxes and
otters and muskrats to be their incident. For fifty years the beaver was
the great source of Western wealth; then came the buffalo to roundly
cover twenty-five years. After that, the cattle; to be followed by the
railway and the farm.

If one were to catalogue those human influences that have dealt with the
West, the count in its procession would run somewhat like this: There
was the