and another man, and took refuge in a dugout in the sand hills below the city, comporting themselves according to the most accepted dime-novel standards. Clumsily arrested by one hundred men or so, instead of being tidily killed by three or four, as would have been the case on the frontier, they were put in jail, given columns of newspaper notice, and worshiped by large crowds of maudlin individuals. These men probably died in the belief that they were "bad." They were not bad men, but imitations, counterfeit, and, indeed, nothing more than cheap and dirty little murderers.

Of course, we all feel able to detect the mere notoriety hunter, who poses about in cheap pretentiousness; but now and then in the West there turned up something more difficult to understand. Perhaps the most typical case of imitation bad man ever known, at least in the Southwest, was Bob Ollinger, who was killed by Billy the Kid in 1881, when the latter escaped from jail at Lincoln, New Mexico. That Ollinger was a killer had been proved beyond the possibility of a doubt. He had no respect for human life, and those who knew him best knew that he

was a murderer at heart. His reputation was gained otherwise than through the severe test of an "even break." Some say that he killed Chavez, a Mexican, as he offered his own hand in greeting. He killed another man, Hill, in a similarly treacherous way. Later, when, as a peace officer, he was with a deputy, Pierce, serving a warrant on one Jones, he pulled his gun and, without need or provocation, shot Jones through. The same bullet, passing through Jones's body, struck Pierce in the leg and left him a cripple for life. Again, Ollinger was out as a deputy with a noted sheriff in pursuit of a Mexican criminal, who had taken refuge in a ditch. Ollinger wanted only to get into a position where he could shoot the man, but his superior officer crawled alone up the ditch, and, rising suddenly, covered his man and ordered him to surrender. The Mexican threw down his gun and said that he would surrender to the sheriff, but that he was sure Ollinger would kill him. This fear was justified. "When I brought out the man," said the sheriff, "Ollinger came up on the run, with his cocked six-shooter in his hand. His long hair was flying behind him as he ran, and I never in my life saw so devilish a look on any human being's

face. He simply wanted to shoot that Mexican, and he chased him around me until I had to tell him I would kill him if he did not stop." "Ollinger was a born murderer at heart," the sheriff added later. "I never slept out with him that I did not watch him. After I had more of a reputation, I think Ollinger would have been glad to kill me for the notoriety of it. I never gave him a chance to shoot me in the back or when I was asleep. Of course, you will understand that we had to use for deputies such material as we could get."

Ollinger was the sort of imitation desperado that looks the part. He wore his hair long and affected the ultra-Western dress, which to-day is despised in the West. He was one of the very few men at that time—twenty-five years ago—who carried a knife at his belt. When he was in such a town as Las Vegas or Sante Fé, he delighted to put on a buckskin shirt, spread his hair out on his shoulders, and to walk through the streets, picking his teeth with his knife, or once in a while throwing it in such a way that it would stick up in a tree or a board. He presented an eye-filling spectacle, and was indeed the ideal imitation bad man. This being the case, there may be interest

in following out his life to its close, and in noting how the bearing of the bad man's title sometimes exacted a very high price of the claimant.

Ollinger, who had made many threats against Billy the Kid, was very cordially hated by the latter. Together with Deputy Bell, of White Oaks, Ollinger had been appointed to guard the Kid for two weeks previous to the execution of the death sentence which had been imposed upon the latter. The Kid did not want to harm Bell, but he dearly hated Ollinger, who never had lost an opportunity to taunt him. Watching his chance, the Kid at length killed both Bell and Ollinger, shooting the latter with Ollinger's own shotgun, with which Ollinger had often menaced his prisoner.

Other than these two men, the Kid and Ollinger, I know of no better types each of his own class. One was a genuine bad man, and the other was the genuine imitation of a bad man. They were really as far apart as the poles, and they are so held in the tradition of that bloody country to-day. Throughout the West there are two sorts of wolves—the coyote and the gray wolf. Either will kill, and both are lovers of blood. One is yellow at heart, and the other

is game all the way through. In outward appearance both are wolves, and in appearance they sometimes grade toward each other so closely that it is hard to determine the species. The gray wolf is a warrior and is respected. The coyote is a sneak and a murderer, and his name is a term of reproach throughout the West.

Chapter III

The Land of the Desperado—The Frontier of the Old West—The Great Unsettled Regions—The Desperado of the Mountains—His Brother of the Plains—The Desperado of the Early Railroad Towns.

There was once a vast empire, almost unknown, west of the Missouri river. The white civilization of this continent was three hundred years in reaching it. We had won our independence and taken our place among the nations of the world before our hardiest men had learned anything whatever of this Western empire. We had bought this vast region and were paying for it before we knew what we had purchased. The wise men of the East, leading men in Congress, said that it would be criminal to add this territory to our already huge domain, because it could never be settled. It was not dreamed that civilization

would ever really subdue it. Even much later, men as able as Daniel Webster deplored the attempt to extend our lines farther to the West, saying that these territories could not be States, that the East would suffer if we widened our West, and that the latter could never be of value to the union! So far as this great West was concerned, it was spurned and held in contempt, and it had full right to take itself as an outcast. Decreed to the wilderness forever, it could have been forgiven for running wild. Denominated as unfit for the occupation of the Eastern population, it might have been expected that it would gather to itself a population all its own.

It did gather such a population, and in part that population was a lawless one. The frontier, clear across to the Pacific, has at one time or another been lawless; but this was not always the fault of the men who occupied the frontier. The latter swept Westward with such unexampled swiftness that the machinery of the law could not always keep up with them. Where there are no courts, where each man is judge and jury for himself, protecting himself and his property by his own arm alone, there always have gathered also the lawless, those who do not wish the day of law to come, men who want

license and not liberty, who wish crime and not lawfulness, who want to take what is not theirs and to enforce their own will in their own fashion.

"There are two states of society perhaps equally bad for the promotion of good morals and virtue—the densely populated city and the wilderness. In the former, a single individual loses his identity in