don't exactly."

His eyes were as vague as his words, gentle, and smiling.

"Thirty-two?" said Billy sharply. "You look more like twenty-five to me.
S'pose we split the difference, eh?"

And with a grin he wrote: "Age twenty-two or three."

"Business?"

"Trapper."

"Good! The sheriff is pretty keen for 'em. You gents in that game got
a sort of nose for the trail, mostly. All right, Cumber, you'll see
Glass."

He stood at the door.

"By the way, Cumber, is that straight about startin' your shot with your
gun in the holster?"

"I s'pose it is."

"You s'pose?" grunted the clerk. "Well, come on in."

He banged once on the door and then threw it open. "Joe Cumber, Pete.
And he drilled the ball startin' his gun out of the leather. Here's his
card."

He closed the door, and once more the stranger stood almost cringing
against it, and once more his fingers deftly turned the key--softly,
silently--and extracted it from the lock.

The sheriff had not looked up from the study of the card, for reading
was more difficult to him than man-killing, and Joe Cumber had an
opportunity to examine the room. It was hung with a score of pictures.
Some large, some small, but most of them enlargements, it was apparent
of kodak snapshots, for the eyes had that bleary look which comes in
photographs spread over ten times their intended space. The faces had
little more than bleary eyes in common, for there were bearded men, and
smooth-shaven faces, and lean and fat men; there were round, cherubic
countenances, and lean, hungry heads; there were squared, protruding
chins, and there were chins which sloped away awkwardly toward the neck;
in fact it seemed that the sheriff had collected twenty specimens to
represent every phase of weakness and strength in the human physiognomy.
But beneath the pictures, almost without exception, there hung weapons:
rifles, revolvers, knives, placed criss-cross in a decorative manner,
and it came to "Joe Cumber" that he was looking at the galaxy of the
dead who had fallen by the hand of Sheriff Pete Glass. Not a face meant
anything to him but he knew, instinctively, that they were the chosen
bad men of the past twenty years.

"So you're Joe Cumber?"

The sheriff turned in his swivel chair and tossed his cigarette butt
through the open window.

"What can I do for you?"

"I got an idea, sheriff, that maybe you'd sort of like to have my
picture."

The sheriff looked up from his study of the car