Just then he noticed "Pete," he said mournfully, " 'taint because 1 don't like it. but I just can't keep it," -- and he justified the statement.

Then this man who had ridden a runaway "loco" over a sixty foot bluff, killing the horse, he himself coming up unhurt ; and who had ridden before stampedes on stormy nights, perhaps felt closer to the summit of the Great Divide than ever before ; or perhaps it was in humorous impulse, for he moaned dismally from the old cowboy song. "Oh. bury me not on the lone prairieee-- ee."

Mrs. E. Joy Johnson of Lusk, Wyoming, writes charmingly of these round-ups in "The Foreman of J. A. 6." when Laughlin, Chamberlain, St. Claire, Woody, Snyder, DeHart, Robb, Sanely Ingraham. Flomer Welker, Perry Braziel, Johnny Minser, Johnny Frantz, Harry Haig, Ed. Wright, and others, many of whom still reside in western Nebraska were among the cowpunchers of the gatherings of eightyfour, and she also relates many amusing incidents.

One of her stories is of Tom Horn's adventures with an outlaw horse.

The picturesqueness of American frontiersmen would lose some of its attractiveness, -- it

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

would be less of an accurate figure of history, -- 'if it lost the classical language of the cowmen. The profanity of a cowpuncher never seemed quite so profane as that of other men. It lacked the grossness of old-time sea captains and longshoremen. It seemed to have the justification of being the effect of a cause. For instance, the picturesque name of Tom Horn's outlaw horse was "Damned-if-I-Do,"' which obtained from its peculiar characteristic never to carry a rider across a stream. Horn's experience was none different from others. He was thrown in midstream and came near drowning. Perhaps, in view of his later achievements and death from the hangman's noose at Cheyenne a few years ago, it would have been better had they let him perish.