oking man ever lived. Brunner told me that he had not changed in
fourteen years.

"'Young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man he says nothing
and chaws tobacco,' That's the way people size 'em up around here."
Brunner thus confirmed my own impression of the pair.

"What a man can see out of the back of his head," Brunner went on, "is a
lot different from what comes in front of his eyes. He feels a lot that
don't make a sound and that ain't visible. I did see, out of the corner
of my eye, that young Henry Thomas was dropping behind me little by
little, but I didn't see why it was he moved up again. I know why,
though. The old man had ordered him up--not in words, you understand,
for I could have heard a whisper in the still dawn, the way we were
snaking it over the trail. From that time on, every foot of the way, the
old man drove the boy. You ask me how, and I can't tell you. There
wasn't a word, not a motion that I could see, but all the time it was
one man driving the other as plain as could be. And it wasn't easy. I
felt that young Henry was worse than balky, that he would have broke
through the bushes and run off screaming if that old man had taken his
eyes off of him for ten seconds.

"A quarter of a mile it was, and we went slow--twenty feet forward
picking our way, then the eight of us would stop to listen. If you ever
get a chance, ask young Henry how long that trail was. If he don't stop
to think, he'll tell you we crawled through the bushes for five miles,
but if he remembers his part as the hero of the fight, he'll say, 'Oh,
we sneaked a hundred yards or so before lighting into Queen's bunch.'"

The trail from above ended in a briar tangle fifty feet up the hill
from the ledge on which four of the five outlaws slept. The fifth man,
posted as a sentry, was on the lower trail, somewhere out of sight of
the party led by "Cap" White. When the deputies came up to the briars,
therefore, they could see no one. As soon as the four sleepers came out
of shelter, however, White's men could cover them with their guns.

What had to be done, obviously, was to rouse the four outlaws without
revealing the presence of the deputies above. It could be done by some
one in the woods below the ledge. But the outpost was down there to
reckon with. They could not all be trapped merely by waiting, for they
would come out, after waking, one by one; and White wanted the whole
bunch.

It was decided that three men shoul