Rider of Lost Creek (Electronic book text)

"Chapter One
"
A lone cowhand riding a hard-pressed horse stepped down from the saddle and whipped the dust from his hat by a few stiff blows against his chaps. He stood for an instant looking up and down the street, crowded with buckboards, saddle horses and men. It was ten o'clock in the morning but Dodge was a twenty-four-hour town with thirty thousand head of cattle held on the grass outside of town, and more coming in every day.
Pushing his way through the bat-wing doors, he crossed the almost empty room to the bar. "Rye," he said, and glanced quickly around the room.
Only two men stood at the bar at this hour, a burly cattle-buyer and a drummer, the latter still only half awake and nursing a hangover from the night before.
Several other men played cards at the scattered tables, all within range of his voice.
"Never would've believed it," the cowhand said, "but they're stringin' wire on the plains of Texas "
"Ain't practical," the cattle-buyer said dogmatically. "That there's a free range country and it should stay thataway. They'll never stand for it, anyway."
"Don't make no difference," the cowhand insisted. "They're doin' it." He glanced around the room again and his tone lowered. "Have you seen Kilkenny?"
There was a sudden stillness in the room. The cattle-buyer glanced uneasily at the bartender, who was suddenly very busy mopping the bar. For a long moment nobody spoke.
A cattleman at the nearest poker table picked up his cards, glanced at them, folded them into a neat packet and placed them on the table. "No, I haven't seen him, and I'm not likely to . . . Nor are you. He's a man who prefers to be left alone, and if you know anything about Kilkenny you know he's a good man to leave alone."
"I've been sent to find him," the puncher said stubbornly, "an' I'm to stay at it until I do."
A man had moved to the bar beside him. He was a square-shouldered young man with a look about him the cowhand did not like. Moreover, he knew the man by sight, as did a good many Texas men. Wes Hardin was a veteran of the Sutton-Taylor feud and one of the most feared men in Texas. When men talked of guns and gunfighters, they spoke of him in the same breath with Bill Hickok, Royal Barnes and the Brockman twins.
"What do you want with Kilkenny?" Hardin asked.
"Looks like a range war shapin' up in the Live Oak country," the puncher told them. "They're shapin' up for a shootin' war, sure enough."
"Don't look for Kilkenny, then," the cattle-buyer advised. "He's a man who minds his own affairs. He wouldn't be a paid warrior for any man. If you're looking for a fighting man for a range war, you'd better hunt somebody else."
"You won't have to look far, either," the bartender commented grimly. "If there's one gunman in this town, there's fifty . . . and fifty more nearly as good."
"This is different," the puncher replied. "My boss is an old friend of his."
"Somebody said he was riding with King Fisher's outfit," a gambler suggested.
"Don't you believe it " the cattle-buyer said. "He never rode with any outfit except as a cowhan