out on the prairie somewhere, and Harris said he would ride a wild one. Jerry held the lantern and Harris threw a rope at random into the corral. He caught a wild-eyed mare. They snubbed her up to the fence, saddled her,' and Harris mounted in the saddle. In the lantern light she reared, knocked out the light and disappeared in blackness. Jerry struck a match, and saw Harris aholding the animal down.

"Open the gate," he said.

This was done, and the dark form of horse and rider shot into the night. That ride to Sidney, over prairies full of badger and prairie dog holes, buffalo wallows, and the

like, on a wild, never-before-ridden horse, in the night, was accomplished in short order.

Harris kept the animal headed east and generally between the railroad and the creek, by slapping the side of its head, this side and then the other, with rope, and hat and hand. After the first frenzied effort to roll him off, its one purpose seemed to be to wish to run away from its tormentor, but he stuck like a leach.

The doctor arrived before daylight.

Later Fritzie went entirely to the bad and died in the poor-house. The boys liked him, but he wasted whatever they liberally bestowed upon him, and in useless dissipation.

chapter xxxii

Mcdonald hung by vigilantes at sidney-- sheriff trognitz's toke -- practical tokes of old timers

By 1881, the gun men of Sidney were again making themselves so generally obnoxious, that a drastic and a lawless exhibition became necessary to show them that it must end. The slow process of courts would not have the immediate effects which conditions urged, and which the vigilantes hoped to accomplish.