Page:Saga of Billy the Kid.djvu/40

country, and began the practice of his profession under singularly auspicious circumstances with Murphy's firm as his most lucrative client. The favour of such an important personage as Murphy gave the young lawyer immediate prestige; the frontier took with considerable enthusiasm to litigation, if not to law, and McSween's practice grew with amazing rapidity.

To add the completing detail to her pleasant and hospitable home, Mrs. McSween, an accomplished musician, ordered a piano shipped out from St. Louis, and her announcement of the coming of the instrument was the most exciting piece of news Lincoln had had since the Horrel boys shot up the town. The remote mountain village had only vague knowledge of pianos, based chiefly on pictures in infrequent newspapers and on the hearsay evidence of such of its citizens as had made the grand tour to Santa Fé. It knew fiddles, guitars, banjos, accordions, mouth-harps, and tin whistles, but not pianos. There never had been a piano in Lincoln and there probably was not, at that time, a piano in all the wide stretch of country between Las Vegas and the Staked Plains.

The fifteen-hundred-mile journey from St. Louis of Lincoln's pioneer piano was not without interesting adventures. There was not a mile of railroad in New Mexico. The Santa Fe had reached only as far west as Trinidad in southern Colorado and was not to get south of the Raton Mountains until 1878. From St. Louis to Trinidad the piano travelled by rail. From Trinidad to Lincoln it was borne in state on a wagon drawn by four horses. No sooner had it made the toilsome passage over Raton Pass and headed southeastward for the Capitans than its progress became a matter of public moment. The news of its coming ran before it; the little Mexican towns along the