ree suitors; with all he was upon terms of equal friendship. It
seemed as if Jim had made up his mind in the beginning to let the best
one win; it was a free, fair, square race, so far as Jim was concerned,
and that was why Jim always had stanch backers in Jake Dodsley, Barber
Sam, and Three-fingered Hoover.

My sympathies were all with Hoover; he and I were pardners. He loved the
girl in his own beautiful, awkward way. He seldom spoke of her to me,
for he was not the man to unfold what his heart treasured. He was not an
envious man, yet sometimes he would tell how he regretted that early
education had not fallen to his lot, for in that case he, too, might have
been a poet. Mother--the old red fiddle--was his solace. Coming home to
our cabin late of nights I'd hear him within scraping away at that tune
De Blanc had written for him, and he believed what Mother sung to him in
her squeaky voice of the deathlessness of true love. And many a time--I
can tell it now--many a time in the dead of night I have known him to
steal out of the cabin with Mother and go up the main road to the gateway
of The Bower, where, in moonlight or in darkness (it mattered not to
him), he would repeat over and over again that melancholy tune, hoping
thereby to touch the sensibilities of the lady of his heart.

In the early part of February there was a second robbery. This time the
stage was overhauled at Lone Pine, a ranch five miles beyond the camp.
The details of this affair were similar to those of the previous business
in the glen. A masked man sprang from the roadside, presented two
revolvers at Steve Barclay's head, and called upon all within the stage
to come out, holding up their hands. The outrage was successfully
carried out, but the booty was inconsiderable, somewhat less than eight
hundred dollars falling into the highwayman's hands. The robber and his
pals fled as before; the time that elapsed before word could be got to
camp facilitated the escape of the outlaws.

A two days' scouring of the surrounding country revealed absolutely no
sign or trace of the fugitives. But it was pretty evident now that the
two crimes had been committed by a gang intimately acquainted with, if
not actually living in, the locality. Confirmation of this was had when
five weeks later the stage was again stopped and robbed at Lone Pine
under conditions exactly corresponding with the second robbery. The
mystery baffled the wits of all. Intens