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from the half-obliterated and weather-stained business signs which still tell dimly that here was a saloon, here a dance hall. Most of the residences are vacant and falling into ruin. Vagrant cows straggle through gaps in broken fences and crop the herbage of once well-tended lawns. White Oaks is a ghost town. When it was a booming gold camp in the late '70's, its streets were crowded, its merchants waxed rich, saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses were in full blast day and night, drinks were paid for in raw gold weighed in little scales on the bar, and gamesters bet buckskin bags full of gold dust on a card at faro. But the veins of gold on Baxter peak pinched out, the people left for other parts to seek their fortunes, and the town's glories suddenly departed. In the days of the gold stampede, White Oaks had more than two thousand inhabitants; now it has fifty.

Mrs. Barber is a fragile wisp of a woman in the twilight of life with traces of the comeliness and charm that made her famous as a frontier beauty and no little of the energy and courage that enabled her to weather the tragedies and sorrows of her pioneer days. The havoc and bloodshed of the feud are fresh in her mind and its old hatreds still vivid.

"Once settled at Three Rivers," she said, "I felt like a soul that had lived in torment and had escaped from hell to Heaven. After Lincoln, I cannot tell what happiness it was to gallop over the hills on my own ranch and breathe in the clean, pure air. I knew peace and contentment again for the first time in years.

"John Chisum himself assisted in driving my herd of heifers from the Pecos to my new home. The cattle were a godsend. They enabled me to build a new prosperity after the war had robbed me of nearly everything I had.