the question of getting the sickle bar down to engage the grass, and getting it up again to pass over an obstruction.
Dan had turnea the machine over to him with that, as a tribute to his mechanical genius, saying that the simple, skeleton construction of a rake was nearer his understanding. They had haggled off a few acres of grass by sunset, but such labor as that was little more than play to them, tough as both of them were.
"I want to introduce you to a friend of mine," Dan proposed. "You've heard me speak of her—Cattle Kate."
Barrett expressed more delight over the prospect than he felt, although he had a well defined curiosity to see this queen of the range, whose name was familiar in every cowpuncher's mouth for a hundred miles or more, he had been told. Thus, with the anticipation of delight on one hand, of a rather commonplace adventure on the other, the two friends rode into Bonita, the place that Fred Grubb had described as a louse clinging to the border of the military reservation.
Bonita was a place of few houses ranged along the road that divided the military reservation from the unrestricted part of that country. It had drawn as close to the source of its sustenance as it was geographically possible for it to do, and there it lay waiting with its doors open like gaping mouths, to swallow such victims as came its way.
It was a place proscribed, a pitfall of iniquities, where enlisted men from the post came to revel away their pay; to which cowpunchers and wranglers rode incred-
