We had talked ourselves pretty near out when a rider splashed up to the door. His ragged beard stuck out stiff, full of rain-drops, and his slouch hat had an unpleasant tilt forward. To Carter's invitation to enter he shook his head, asked if such-and-such a person had passed within the hour, and, receiving an affirmative reply, pulled his hat down tighter and galloped away west. "Who is that?" I inquired.
"That! Why, that's Borden. It's easy to see you're new out here. His hand holds the river from Saint Joe to Omaha, and men think twice before trying to break his grip." He drew out his pipe and tobacco, stuffed the bowl thoughtfully, and struck a match. "If you want to hear about the first time I saw him at work, I'll tell you."
I nodded.
"Eh? Well, this was the way of it":
At the end of the war I settled here—that was five years ago. Borden lived a mile up the creek, and so, as times went, we were neighbors. By the people yonder in Kinton he was not liked, being grim, rough, savage, altogether unsociable and short of word. Besides, they remembered '57. In that year he appeared from no one knew where, took his claim, and proceeded to live after his own fashion. Then the high-handed Claim Club of the village went about it to drive him "in or over the river"—a bad night for them. They rode back to Kinton with three dead men laid across saddles. That was in the rough days of the Territory, the days when men in the Nebraska hills along the Missouri were a law unto themselves.
"THEY CROWDED HIS HORSE UNTIL IT HUNG BACK FROM THE OTHERS"
Once he tied up on his own deck a steamboat captain who was drunk and bent on murder; single-handed he ran down two horse-thieves; and another time he choked the money out of a river-gambler who had robbed a boy. Oh, they knew Borden up and down the river in those days! Then he went to war as one of Thayer's sharpshooters, returning at the end of it to be appointed United States marshal. And he had been riding that saddle six months when I came.
One day he and another pulled rein at my door.