Sunset Ranch: A Story of a Boy's Adventures in the West — page 108: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

[00 The Grand Round-Up. gotten in nature’s demand for food, once more turned the heads of their weary ponies toward the ranch. : Though all of them were dead tired, such fellows can stand an incredible amount of work and live, so that they laughed and joked in the merry manner peculiar to their class, as the homeward trail was taken up. Old Sile had a fund of reminiscences at his fingers’ ends, and could relate yarns without number of the days when he had trapped alongside the great Kit Carson, or hunted Indians with Custer and Buffalo Bill. Such tales always sound better when related by the one who actually experienced the adventure re- corded, and in the eyes of Cuthbert, as well as Karl, the ancient cowboy was a veritable hero—others less credulous thought he was only a border Munchau- sen, and liked his yarns for their thrilling origi- nality. : | But whether he stretched these adventures simply to interest the boys or told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the old boy had really been concerned in more perilous scrapes than any man within three States; and, through all, his ~ nerve still remained as steady and his odd chuckle as predominant as in early days. He was a type fast disappearing from the Wild West, a remnant of the good old Kit Carson days, when forty-niners crossed the Great Divide, braving the perils by the way, and yet able, old chap that he was, to hold his own with any of the young blood on the cattle ranges. COnnicloooks CO