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THE KING OF THE VALLEY
17

fish that ran under the house across a corner of the kitchen and I often sat on the back porch in a rocking chair, with Billy to bait my hook for me, and caught a string of perch for dinner.

"When Uncle John set out his cottonwoods he and his brothers, Pitzer and James, planted three young trees close to one another and, bending their stems inward, bound them together. In time the three trees grew into one, and it stands to-day, a towering giant, supported at the bottom on wide triple arches formed of the three original trunks. The first time I showed Billy the 'Tree of the Three Brothers' and told him it typified the love the three men bore for one another, as Uncle John said it should when the saplings were planted, I remember how touched Billy was at such an example of brotherly affection. He was only a boy, you know, and deep down in his hard little heart there must have been a little sentiment left; and thinking, perhaps, of the love and tenderness his own life had missed, he looked so wistful and woebegone I felt called on to cheer him up. 'You needn't cry,' I said to my sentimental desperado.

"Sheriff Pat Garrett was another frequent visitor at the ranch. A tremendously tall man, but not ungainly or awkward; moving, in fact, with a certain swinging grace which suggested power and sureness. Despite his crooked mouth and crooked smile which made his whole face seem crooked, he was a remarkably handsome man. A calm, poised spirit seemed to look at you out of his steady gray eyes. There was mighty little poetry in Garrett—he was about as lyric as one of his own six-shooters—but the face of the old border fighter suggested in some vague way that of Edgar Allan Poe. He looked melancholy and tragic but he could be genial and sociable, and when his