s immediately
pointed to Seagrue as the man who had first fired at him.

There were a few pretty hot moments on the platform when Bucks, among
a group of five camp malefactors on their way to Medicine Bend,
confronted the two men who had tried to kill him, and unhesitatingly
pointed them out. Seagrue, tall and surly, denied vehemently ever
having been at Point of Rocks and ever having seen Bucks. He declared
the whole affair was "framed up" to send him to the penitentiary. He
threatened if he were "sent up" to come back and kill Bucks if it was
twenty years later--and did, in that respect, try to keep his word.

But his threats availed him nothing, and John Rebstock who, though
still young, was a sly fox in crooked ways, contented himself with a
philosophical denial of everything alleged against him, adding only in
an injured tone that nobody would believe a fat man anyway.

It was he, however, rather than the less clever Seagrue, who had begun
to excite sympathy for what he called his luckless plight and that of
his companion, before they had left the railroad camp. Among the five
evil-doers who had been rounded-up and deported for the jail at
Medicine Bend, and now accompanied the two gamblers, Rebstock spread
every story he could think of to arouse his friends at Medicine Bend
to a demonstration in his behalf.

The very first efforts at putting civil law and order into effect
were just then being tried in the new and lawless frontier railroad
town and the contest between the two elements of decency and of
license had reached an acute pass when Rebstock and Seagrue were
thrown into jail at Medicine Bend. A case of sympathy for them was not
hard to work up among men of their own kind and threats were heard up
and down Front Street that if the railroading of two innocent men to
the penitentiary were attempted something would happen.

Railroad men themselves, hearing the mutterings, brought word of them
to head-quarters, but Stanley was in no wise disturbed. He had wanted
to make an example for the benefit of the criminals who swarmed to the
town, and now welcomed the chance to put the law's rigor on the men
that had tried to assassinate his favorite operator. Bucks, lest he
might be made the victim of a more successful attack, was brought down
from Point of Rocks the first moment he could be relieved. A plot to
put him out of the way, as the sole witness against the accused
gamblers, was uncovered by Scott almost a