Tapadero

In a country where the six-shooter was in every man's hand, he rarely wore a gun. Where swearing was part of the lingua franca, he seldom swore. Where no man would get on a horse without wearing high-heeled cowboy boots, he wore low-heeled shoes and admired the use of the Mexican tapadero, the slipper like leather guard over the front of the stirrup, to avoid the risk of being dragged. Always and individualist, he continued to assert his aloofness from the West, even though he loved the land and the life of the cowboy. By his early twenties William Lewis was a top hand of the R.O. Ranch; by his lat twenties he was a highly regarded cattleman who was able not only to purchase his first great Panhandle ranch, but also to lease a ranch of over half a million acres. Not too many years later he realized a boyhood dream by acquiring the R.O. Ranch. The subject of Mrs. Lewis's biography is pure Texas, but not the Texas so often portrayed in synthetic westerns.