Assisted by Ned Buntline, novelist, and Colonel Ingraham, he started his “Wild West” show, which later developed and expanded into “A Congress of the Rough Riders of the World,” first presented at Omaha, Nebraska. In time it became a familiar yearly entertainment in the great cities of this country and Europe. Many famous personages attended the performances, and became his warm friends, including Mr. Gladstone, the Marquis of Lome, King Edward, Queen Victoria, and the Prince of Wales, now King of England. At the outbreak of the Sioux, in 1890 and 1891, Colonel Cody served at the head of the Nebraska National Guard. In 1895 Cody took up the development of Wyoming Valley by introducing irrigation. Not long afterward he became judge advocate general of the Wyoming National Guard. Colonel Cody (Buffalo Bill) died in Denver, Colorado, on January 10, 1917. His legacy to a grateful world was a large share in the development of the West, and a multitude of achievements in horsemanship, marksmanship, and endurance that will live for ages. His life will continue to be a leading example of the manliness, courage, and devotion to duty that belonged to a picturesque phase of American life now passed, like the great patriot whose career it typified, into the Great Beyond. BUFFALO BILL’S GIRL PARD. CHAPTER I. A DASTARDLY PLOT. Nate Bernritter, or “Bern,” as he was usually called when not referred to as “the old man,” was in an unpleasant frame of mind. He was superintendent in charge of the mining, milling and cyaniding at the Three-ply Gold-mine, but the cares of his official position could not wholly have accounted for the perplexed frown on his brow, the hunted look in his eyes, or the fierce, spasmodic clenching and unclenching of his big, brown hands. Pacing the narrow confines of his office and chewing savagely on an unlighted cigar, he muttered to himself, over and over again, his voice a husky and hopeless whisper: “We’re at the end of our rope; McGowan has taken the one step that will put the kibosh on us. Had we better duck out of here between two days and get across the Mexican border, or stay and try and brazen the matter out?” He stopped before a window. Leaning against the wall, he looked out dejectedly. The “plant” of the Three-ply lay below him, in the bottom of the scarred and blistered valley. Off to the right was the bunk-house and chuck-shanty. Several rods below the bunk-house was the ten-stamp mill, throbbing with the roar of the great stamps pounding out the gold. To the left of the mill were rows of big wooden tanks, where the mill “tailings” were treated with cyanid of potassium; and to the left of the tanks again, was the little adobe laboratory where the man--Jacobs by name--who had charge of the cyaniding, made his tests and did the assaying, refined mill, and cyanid bullion, and ran it into molds.