he had ever longed for; absolute immunity from care or exertion or
strife; an endless welcome, and a host whose delight at the sixteenth
repetition of a song or a story was as keen as at its initial giving.
Was there ever a troubadour of old who struck upon as royal a castle
in his wanderings? While he lay thus, meditating upon his blessings,
little brown cottontails would shyly frolic through the yard; a covey
of white-topknotted blue quail would run past, in single file, twenty
yards away; a _paisano_ bird, out hunting for tarantulas, would hop
upon the fence and salute him with sweeping flourishes of its long
tail. In the eighty-acre horse pasture the pony with the Dantesque
face grew fat and almost smiling. The troubadour was at the end of his
wanderings.

Old man Ellison was his own _vaciero_. That means that he supplied his
sheep camps with wood, water, and rations by his own labours instead
of hiring a _vaciero_. On small ranches it is often done.

One morning he started for the camp of Incarnación Felipe de la Cruz y
Monte Piedras (one of his sheep herders) with the week's usual rations
of brown beans, coffee, meal, and sugar. Two miles away on the trail
from old Fort Ewing he met, face to face, a terrible being called King
James, mounted on a fiery, prancing, Kentucky-bred horse.

King James's real name was James King; but people reversed it because
it seemed to fit him better, and also because it seemed to please his
majesty. King James was the biggest cattleman between the Alamo plaza
in San Antone and Bill Hopper's saloon in Brownsville. Also he was the
loudest and most offensive bully and braggart and bad man in southwest
Texas. And he always made good whenever he bragged; and the more noise
he made the more dangerous he was. In the story papers it is always