HE times of John Barton are gone, although there still live in the Far West men with gray beards, halting steps and numbered days who can, from the somewhat dusty archives of memory, recall him. The type of men like John Barton seems also to have gone—unless, as ghosts, they haunt the trails that have grown dim or become obliterated through lack of use or utility. The very land that knew John Barton has changed from windswept valleys of grass, or deserts that needed but irrigation, to well-ordered farms tilled by a generation to whom a buffalo or a wild steer is as foreign as an animal in a menagerie. Of John Barton nothing but the legend remains. Not even those ancients with rheumy eyes from which the frontier keenness and alertness have long faded can tell whence he came, or what his antecedents; nor are these pertinent, for it is of what he did that they remember, and perhaps garrulously boast as if to prove to their grandchildren that their own brilliant days of lusty manhood were more virile, more stirring, more testing than these humdrum times of lethargic peace.
It was in those “days now dead beyond recall”—thank God!—that into the then straggling street of Big Cañon wandered John Barton, tall, bent, yet active despite gray hair and white beard. Hands and face were gnarled, but his eyes were keen, gray and of a disarming benevolence. He spoke but little, and always in a gentle voice, a voice that seemed to protest against anything harsh or sudden. He appeared content with the sole friendship of a dog. And the dog seemed equally content with the sole friendship of John Barton; for it was ever at his heels, or by his side when he sat down, and the gnarled hand invariably came to rest on the dog's head. Men observed the dog as much as its master; for it was a huge mongrel whose ancestry at some time had included a timber wolf. It resented its master's intercourse with other men, eying the entire world askance as if anticipating malevolence. It had unquestionably been trained to guard John Barton's back; for whenever the man stopped in the street, the dog would instantly fall behind him, face the other way and keep vigilant watch. Once a man, imbued with friendliness, started to lay a hand on John Barton's shoulder—and there came through the air like a bolt of gray wrath, with huge fangs exposed and great head outthrust, that dog. Nothing save the quick thrust of Barton's arm saved the ripping of a man's throat, and provoked the only explanation he, John Barton, was ever known to give of his former life.
“Don't blame him, sir. —Down, Sioux! Get behind me! —He thought maybe you was goin' to go for me. You see, me and him's been in a country where we had to sort of look out for each other when the corners were tight, and—he meant nothin' by it—saved my life more'n once, and—”
His low, gentle voice died away into mumbled, inaudible, broken sentences, an habitual closure; but after that, the reputation of the dog called Sioux was established, and men moved with caution when in its vicinity. Yet dog and man had what was the extreme virtue of their days and environment, in that each strictly, unendingly, resolutely, “minded his own business.”
HE “business” of John Barton, it became known, was cattle. A cow-man might have denied this and called him, contemptuously, “a nester;” but he was the forerunner of those who knew how to farm as well as “run stock,' and most of all, knew how to depend upon themselves entirely and adequately. Big Cañon, being a divisional headquarters, caught the gossip of railway crews that the company had been induced to build a small cattle-pen and chute at Manipa; and men smiled and wondered, because Manipa, the first station west of Big Cañon, and eighty miles distant, had theretofore consisted of but three structures, a tiny red station, a huge, round water-tank, and a patchwork hovel for the section gang. Yet in due time three carloads of young stock consigned to John Barton were by him and Sioux driven away.
It was Tom Horn, the somewhat inquisitive storekeeper from whom John Barton bought his supplies, who first gleaned information of the latter's situation, hopes and emprise, with which he seemed content.