but again, in scorn, he accepted the challenge and poured a stiff dram.

"That's right," nodded the sheriff. "You got nothing on your shoulders.
You can let yourself go, Vic. Sometimes I wish"--he sighed--"I wish I
could do the same!"

"The sneaky coyote," thought Gregg, "he's lurin' me on!"

"Turned state's evidence!" maundered Lew Perkins. "Well, they's a lot of
'em that lose their guts when they're caught. I remember way back in the
time when Bannack was runnin' full blast--"

Why did not some one shut off the old idiot before he was thoroughly
started? He might keep on talking like the clank of a windmill in
a steady breeze, endlessly. For Lew was old-seventy-five, eighty,
eighty-five--he himself probably did not know just how old--and he had
lived through at least two generations of pioneers with a myriad stories
about them. He could string out tales of the Long Trail: Abilene,
Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend, Newton, where eleven men were murdered
in one night; he knew the vigilante days in San Francisco, and early
times in Alder Gulch.

"Nobody would of thought Plummer was yaller, but he turned out that
way," droned on the narrator. "Grit? He had enough to fit out twenty
men. When Crawford shot him and busted his right arm, he went right
on and learned to shoot with his left and started huntin' Jack again.
Packed that lead with him till he died, and then they found Jack's
bullet in his wrist, all worked smooth by the play of the bones.
Afterwards it turned out that Plummer ran a whole gang; but before
we learned that we'd been fools enough to make him sheriff. We got to
Plummer right after he'd finished hangin' a man, and took him to his own
gallows."

"You'd of thought a cool devil like that would of made a good end, but
he didn't. He just got down on his knees and cried, and asked God to
help him. Then he begged us to give him time to pray, but one of the
boys up and told him he could do his prayin' from the cross-beam. And
that was Henry Plummer, that killed a hundred men, him an' his gang."

"H-m-m," murmured the sheriff, and looked uneasily about. Now that his
eyes were turned away, Vic could study him at leisure, and he wondered
at the smallness of the man. Suppose one were able to lay hands on him
it would be easy to--

"See you later, boys," drawled Glass, and sauntered from the room.

Lew Perkins sighed as the most important part of his audience
disappeared, but having started talking the impe