ground, and he had been just the fraction of a second too late. "My luck's runnin' mighty low," he muttered softly, and threw back his shoulders, as his teeth gritted hard, "but I'm still in the game, an' maybe this will change it." Very carefully, very tenderly, he placed the blossom beneath the band inside his hat. "I must go an' hunt for Bat, the old renegade! If anything's happened to him--if that damned Long Bill has laid for him--I will kill a man, sure enough." He gathered up his reins and rode on up the trail, and as he rode the shadows lengthened. Only once he paused and looked backward at the little ugly white town. Before him the trail dipped into a wide valley and he rode on. And, as the feet of his horse thudded softly in the grey dust of the trail, the sound blended with the low, wailing chant of the mournful dirge of the plains: "O bury me not on the lone prairie Where the wild coyotes will howl o'er me, Where the rattlesnakes hiss and the crow flies free, O bury me not on the lone prairie."