shrewd enough to hit the nail square, too, Mark. 'And,' he rambles on,
'you've come to the right man. But am I goin' to blab now, havin' kept a
shut mouth all these years?' And then he goes on, his rheumy-red eyes
blinking, to proclaim that he is feeling a whole lot stronger these
days, that he is getting his second wind, so to speak; that come
mid-spring he'll be as frisky as a colt, and that then he means to have
what is his own! And that is as close as he ever comes to saying
anything. About this one thing, I mean. He'll chatter like a magpie
about anything else, even his own youthful evil deeds. He seems to know
somehow that no longer has the law any interest in his old carcass, and
begins to brag a bit of the wild days up and down the forks of the
American and of his own share in it all; half lies and the other half
blood-dripping truth, I'd swear. It makes a man shiver to listen to the
old cut-throat."

"He can't live a thousand years," mused King. "He is eighty now, if he's
a day."

"Eighty-four by his own estimate. But when it's a question of that, he
sits there and sucks at his toothless old gums and giggles that it's the
first hundred years that are the hardest to get through with and he's
gettin' away with 'em."

"He knows something, Ben."

"So do we, or think we do. So does Brodie, it would seem. Does old
Honeycutt know any more than the rest of us?"

"We are all young men compared with Loony Honeycutt, all
Johnny-come-lately youngsters. Gus Ingle and his crowd, as near as we
can figure, came to grief in the winter of 1853. By old Honeycutt's own
count he would have been a wild young devil of seventeen then. And
remember he was one of the roaring crowd that made the country what it
was after '49. He knows where the old cabin was on Lookout; he swears he
knows who built it in that same winter of '53. And----"

"And," cut in Gaynor, "if you believe the murderous old rascal, he knows
with sly, intimate knowledge how and why the man in the lone cabin was
killed. All in that same winter of '53!"

King pricked up his ears.

"I didn't know that. What does he say?"

"He talks on most subjects pretty much at random. He knows that the
sheriff only laughs at him, since who would want to snatch the old
derelict away from his mountains after all these years and try to fix a
crime of more than half a century ago on him? But as the law laughs and
at least pretends to disbelieve, his pride is hurt. So he has gr