Then came the tragedy that made me a "wild one." Some steers from the O-X ranch got mixed with ours. There was a dispute over the brands. Jim won his point, and the O-X peelers left without any particular ill-feeling.

Jim went down to the branding pen to look over the steers. I was standing about two hundred feet away when I heard a shot fired, and an instant later caught sight of Pedro, one of the O-X men, galloping off at a mad speed.

Villainy had been done. I knew it. I ran down to the pens. Jim was crouched over on his knees with a bullet hole in his back.

It was as though everything went dead within me. It was the first real grief I had ever known. I sat there holding Jim's hand when I should have been out after Pedro. I sat there mopping his blood off with a bandana when I should have been yelling for help. Jim was the only friend I had ever had—he was all but God to me.

To shoot a man from behind is crime in the cowboy code. The man who does it is a coward and a murderer. He is pursued and his punishment is death.

Pedro vanished from the face of the earth for a few months. We gave up the chase for him. One day Chicken, a kid of eighteen, came back from the hills. He had been watching our cattle to keep the steers from following a trail herd going north.

"Get your horse," he said. "I know where Pedro is—Presidio county on the Rio Grande."

We left that night with four horses and fifty dollars from Jim's successor. We rode six hundred miles and we got to Uncle Jimmy Ellison's on the Rio Grande just as the peelers were coming back from gathering horses for the spring work. They were running them into the corrals. I rode up and stood at the fence. Pedro came galloping up and into the corrals from the opposite side. He didn't see me.