e. You understand?"

No one pleaded ignorance, and the smith pulled at his pipe to make sure
it had not gone out before resuming.

"Taylor--the old chap, I mean--has sort of ginger hair. His
misses--well, she runs mousey. The young 'uns is mostly ginger, and them
that ain't is mousey. Tony--you know same as I do, Tony's as black in
the hair as a black-fellow, and blacker."

"That's so," Smart observed from the corner post where he was leaning.

"Now, I'll allow there's not much of old Taylor about the look of Tony.
There's a bit of the misses--about the eyes somehow, that makes him like
her."

"That's so," Smart repeated; and every one else was silent, being
interested, for Cullen generally had information, albeit he did
sometimes tie it up in words that neither his hearers nor himself could
understand.

"Then there's the cause," he exclaimed impressively. "There's the fust
cause."

"Where?" Marmot inquired wonderingly. A cause was too great an
attraction for him to permit his missing one voluntarily.

"Why, there," Cullen responded. "Tony's not a bit like Taylor; he _is_ a
bit like the misses, and he's different to all the rest."

"That's it. The woman," Slaughter snarled. "They're always the trouble
in this world. I'd yard 'em up like----"

"Dry up," Marmot exclaimed sharply. He was too involved over the cause
to want to hear Slaughter's well-worn theories on the management of the
other sex. "Where's the cause?" he asked.

"Well, put it plainer. Tony's like his mother, but how d'ye know he
ain't _more_ like his----"

"Smoke!" Marmot cried. "I get it. And yaller head found it out?"

"I don't go after for to say that," Cullen said ponderously. "And Sam
Nuggan, he don't go after for to say that. But he heard him and her one
night as they were riding in, him bringing her back from some moonlight
ride they was always getting up--he heard her say to him, 'But who do
you take after, Tony?' And next day, so Sam Nuggan says, Taylor and his
misses was talkin' a lot and Tony was watchin' a lot, and then he ups
and comes into the township, and the next he hears he'd gone off with
them gully-rakers."

"But it do seem to me----" Smart began.

"That's as clear as I can put it," Cullen interrupted quickly. "There it
is, all in front of you. Tony said he'd come back and report what the
field was in a week or so, and when he comes back, watch him and yaller
head. The yaller head's the cause of it, you take my tip."