With the coming of the granger the ranch was abandoned.

Earnest Brothers, who located on the Niobrara in Sioux county, in 1882, held the ranch for twenty years or more. Wilse Earnest moved to Scottsblufr about 1900, but Jim was ranching some years later. Both are now dead.

Mr. Meeks, who located on the Niobrara, about 1878, fifteen miles up the river from Agate, was at the crossing of the old Ft. LaraT mie-Ft. Robinson Military road.

Lusk became quite a cowtown in the eighties. The cemetery there would no doubt show a few evidences of the hilarious chivalry of cowdays. It became a custom then, when anyone died with "boots on," to put him in a vehicle that answered the purpose of a hearse, and haul it to the cemetery with lariats attached to the saddle horns of cow ponies.

After the burial, a strong board was set up at the head of the grave, and to properly identify it as the burial place of one of the western bunch, it was shot full of holes.

Some of these boards marked the graves of departed ones for years, and no doubt some of them are still to be found. Occasionally, to let their sleeping comrades know that those "still on top of the turf," were keeping alive the spirit of the west and its traditions, a party of passing cow-punchers would re-decorate these crude wooden markers with a battery of fresh bullet holes.

Recently I rambled through the somewhat