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days; a gun was regarded like a shirt or a hat, as an ordinary detail of costume; the average man would have felt undressed without one. But throughout a life passed on the frontier among men bred in a hair-trigger tradition, a weapon was never part of Uncle John Chisum's personal accoutrements. He rode alone and unarmed all over the Southwest, and it took real courage to do that in that lawless time.

"Uncle John Chisum was not more widely known than his famous brand of the Long Rail and Jingle-Bob. No other brand in history ever decorated so many cows at one time. It once identified one hundred thousand cattle as his own. It is gone from the ranges now; only a few old-timers know what it was. To those who never saw it, it is a riddle. The Long Rail is easy to guess. It was just a long bar on the side of a cow, running almost from stem to stern. But what was the Jingle-Bob? Sounding like a nonsense name, it was one of the wisest brands ever invented. Many people to-day, including a few cattlemen, think of it as a bit of knifework on the dewlap. But it was the result of a deep slit in both ears so that one part of the car flapped downward and the other part stood up in its natural way. Not every cowboy could cut the ears correctly. A botch job either left both parts of the bifurcated ear standing erect or both hanging down. It took no little skill to cut the ear so that one part hung down and the other stood upright. Uncle John assigned the work only to a few trusted cow-hands who were adept in Jingle-Bob craftsmanship.

"It was easy to identify Chisum cattle singly or in small bunches by the Long Rail. You could read that brand a mile. But it was in the work of identifying cattle in a big herd that the Jingle-Bob demonstrated its right to be