In another ten minutes the warning-bell on the engine began to toll, and the train ran through a street of rough wooden shanties and pulled up just outside the 'city' (a score of houses sometimes make a city out west), by a little prairie lake. In such a city as Bismarch, in the early days of which I am speaking, even half a dozen pistol shots would not have attracted a policeman, principally because no policemen existed. Sometimes a scoundrel became too daring in his villainies even for such tolerant people as the citizens of Bismarch. When this happened someone shot him, though probably he shot several other people first. At the back of the little group of shanties there used to be a long row of palings about eight feet high. 'Hangman's palings' they called these, because upon them, for want of trees, the first vigilance committee had nine months previously (the 'city' was only fifteen months old) hanged its first batch of victims to the necessities of civilised law and order. In such a city as this a quiet spar would cause no sensation, and certainly would not be interrupted, so Snap quickly stripped, as if he was behind the old School chapel, and Mr. Rufus E. Hackett, his opponent, did the same. Stripped of gloves and hat, Hackett looked less at his ease than his young enemy, and would probably be still waiting to begin if the boy had not stepped in and caught him on the point of the nose with a really straight left-hander. Now, the writer of this story has been hit very frequently upon the nose. After years and years of practice the sensation is still annoying in the extreme. Your eyes fill with water as if you had inadvertently bolted the mustard-pot; the constellations of heaven are seen with alarming clearness; and if you are one of the right sort you come back after that blow like a racquet-ball from the walls of the court. If this is the effect on a nose inured to the rough usage of five-and-twenty years, what must you expect from the owner of a delicately tip-tilted organ, which had been held all its life high above the brutalities of a vulgar world? Like a wounded buffalo, with his head down and blind with rage, the Yankee went for Snap, and, in spite of a well-meant upper cut from that youngster, managed to close with him, and by sheer weight bore him to the ground. There Snap was helpless, and before the big cattle-man could interfere the boy had a couple of lumps on his face, which bore witness to the good-will with which Mr. Hackett had used his beringed fists. But for Snap himself, Mr. Rufus E. H. would there and then have received a sound hiding from the cattle-man, but, though somewhat unsteady on his feet, Snap pleaded that he might have his man left to himself.