les in a stage, and there were six of
us--the two women and four men. On the way the talk turned upon
stage-robbings and hold-ups. With the chance of the real thing as remote
as a visit from Mars, I could be an ass and a braggart. One of the men,
a salesman for a powder company, gave me the rope wherewith to hang
myself. He argued for non-resistance, and I remember that I grew
sarcastic over the spectacle afforded by a grown man, armed and in
possession of his five senses, permitting himself to be robbed without
attempting to resist. You can guess what followed?"

"I'd rather hear you tell it," said the listener at Superintendent
Leckhard's desk. "Go on."

Lidgerwood waited until the switching-engine, with its pop-valve open
and screaming like a liberated devil of the noise pit, had passed.

"Three miles beyond the supper station we had our hold-up; the
cut-and-dried, melodramatic sort of thing you read about, or used to
read about, in the early days, with a couple of Winchesters poking
through the scrub pines to represent the gang in hiding, and one lone,
crippled desperado to come down to the footlights in the speaking part.
You get the picture?"

"Yes; I've seen the original."

"Of course, it struck every soul of us with the shock of the
incredible--the totally unexpected. It was a rank anachronism,
twenty-five years out of date in that particular locality. Before
anybody realized what was happening, the cripple had us lined up in a
row beside the stage, and I was reaching for the stars quite as
anxiously as the little Jew hat salesman, who was swearing by all the
patriarchs that the twenty-dollar bill in his right-hand pocket was his
entire fortune."

"Naturally," Ford commented. "You needn't rawhide yourself for that.
You've been West often enough and long enough at a time to know the
rules of the game--not to be frivolous when the other fellow has the
drop on you."

"Wait," said Lidgerwood. "One minute later the cripple had sized us up
for what we were. The other three men were not armed. I was, and Miss
El--the young woman knew it. Also the cripple knew it. He tapped the
gun bulging in my pocket and said, in good-natured contempt, 'Watch out
that thing don't go off and hurt you some time when you ain't lookin',
stranger.' Ford, I think I must have been hypnotized. I stood there like
a frozen image, and let that crippled cow-rustler rob those two
women--take the rings from their fingers!"

"Oh, hold on;