THE DUDE WRANGLER With his tongue in his cheek, literally, and perspiring like a blacksmith, Teeters sat at the table in the kitchen of the Scissor Ranch house, and by the flickering light of a candle in a lard can wrote letters to the heads of the Vanderbilt and Astor families, to the President and those of his Cabinet whose names he could remember. Briefly, but in a style that was intimate and slightly humorous, Teeters conveyed the information that he was starting a dude ranch, and if they were thinking of taking an outing the coming summer they would be treated right at the "Scissor" or have their money refunded. He guaranteed a first class A1 cook, with a signed contract to wash his hands before breakfast, a good saddle horse for each guest, and plenty of bedding. He did not aim to handle over ten head of dudes to start with, so, if they wanted to play safe, they had better answer upon receipt of his letter, he warned them, signing himself after deliberation: Yure frend C. TEETERS "I'll bet me I'll buy me some lamp chimbleys and heave out this palouser. A feller can't half see what he's doin'," he grumbled as he eyed a large blot on the envelope addressed to the President. "The whole place," sourly, "looks like a widdy woman's outfit." Teeters hammered down the flaps with a vigor that made the unwashed dishes on the table rattle, and grinned as he pictured the astonishment of Major Stephen Douglas Prouty, who was still postmaster, when he read the names of the personages with whom he, Teeters, was in correspondence--after which he looked at the clock and saw that it was only seven. So he thrust his hands in the pockets of his overalls, and, with his chair tilted against the wall at a comfortable angle, speculated as to his chances of success in the dude business. The more Teeters had thought of Mormon Joe's assertion that, outside of stock, the chief asset of the country was its climate and its scenery, the more he had come to believe that Joe's advice to turn the Scissor outfit into a place for eastern tourists was valuable. It had been done elsewhere successfully, and there was no dearth of accommodations on the place, since there was nothing much to the ranch but the buildings, as Toomey had fenced and broken up only enough land to patent the homestead. Although Teeters was now the ostensible owner, in reality the place belonged to Hughie Disston's father, who had been the heaviest loser in the cattle company. Hughie had written Teeters that if they recovered from the reverse, and others that had come to them, they hoped to re-stock the range that was left to them and he wished to spend at least a portion of the year there. In the meantime, it was for Teeters to do what he could with it. "Dudes" had seemed to be the answer to his problem.