down the
brake-levers, tossed the reins away, and clambered stiffly down.

Cassidy turned a strained, hard face on the boy. "I reckon not," he
said sadly, grimly. "I ain't a-goin' home. Nope; I ain't a-goin' no
place that's good. Yuh kin always be sure of that, kid."

"Oh, now, that's all right. Don't get sore," soothed the boy. "That's
all right, Cassidy."

"No, it ain't!" roared Cassidy, angry with the long, hot days and
stifling nights, angry with the work and the scanty pay, angry most
of all with himself. "No, it _ain't_ all right!"

[Illustration: "'I HEREBY PRONOUNCE YUH MAN AND WIFE!'"]

As a previously concealed resolve crystallized at last somewhere in
his brain, his voice rasped up a whole octave.

"Nothin's all right, pardner!" he yelled. "Yuh hear me? Yuh know what
I'm goin' tuh do?" He waved the time-check defiantly above his head
and let go one last howl of sardonic self-derision:

"I'm goin' down tuh the Bucket of Blood _tuh get drunk_!"

* * * * *

The desert town of Ochre, in its more salient points, was not unlike a
desert flower, although its makers were far from desiring it to blush
unseen. Yesterday it had slept unborn in a nook of the sand-hills, the
abiding-place of cat's-claw, mesquit, and flickering lizards.

To-day it burst, with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth.
Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all
these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be
reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling
commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending
counter-currents of hoboes to and from the front, to-morrow it would
simmer down into the desuetude of a siding. Thus is vanity repaid.

Although Cassidy had begun at the "Bucket," he soon discovered that it
possessed no phonograph, and, possessing a craving for music, he had
removed himself and the remains of the pink check to where an aged
instrument in "Red Eye Mike's" guttered forth a doubtful plea for one
"Bill Bailey" to come home.

Here he had remained for five fateful, forgetting days. What Mike and
Mike's friends did to him in that space of time cannot be dwelt upon.
Suffice it to say that on the morning of the sixth day the bleary
semblance of a man who had slept all night in the sand, alongside of a
saloon, awoke to the daylight and a hell of pain.

By dint of soul-racking exertions it managed to roll to i