There's four of us cowpunchers with him all day, an' at night he's surrounded by guards.

His general store and saloon had been bought out by old Joe Cumberland, who declared a determination to clear up the landscape, and thereby plunged the cowpunchers in gloom.

Meantime, Red Jim looked at Hervey and looked at the cowpunchers behind Hervey.

It might have been merely that he did not wish to precede the cowpuncher on a trail which he did not know.

He rehearsed it with himself in a different role, beating the cowpuncher to a helpless pulp of bruised muscle, snatching away his wife.

The first thing he saw was a man dressed as a cowpuncher from belt to spursspurs on a minerbut above the waist he blossomed in a frock coat and a silk hat.

" "Nobody to keep you from it," said the cowpuncher without enthusiasm.

When he had brought her home to his famous ranch, willing for a while to be her slave and give her everything she wanted, she had found Nick a cowpuncher among other cowpunchers.

" No semblance of a smile altered the faces of the cowpunchers around the table, but glances of vague meaning were interchanged.

They were a hardy crew, these cowpunchers of the Jordan ranch, but to the sternest of them this was ugly work.

" Not a cowpuncher within five hundred miles but would be glad of such redoubted company.

Out of this maze he appeared again in a flash of straight galloping, used the impetus for a dozen jarring bucks, then reared and toppled backward to crush the cowpuncher against the earth.