door.

"I'm layin' fer th' man that sticks his head out that door," he warned.

"Stranger," said Black Hank as he neared the door.

The little man paused.

"Might I ask yore name?"

"My name is Alfred," replied the latter.

Black Hank looked chagrined.

"I've hearn tell of you," he acknowledged.

The stranger's eye ran over the room, and encountered that of the girl.
He shrank into himself and blushed.

"Good-night," he said, hastily, and disappeared. A moment later the beat
of hoofs became audible as he led the bunch of horses away.

For a time there was silence. Then Billy, "By God, Hank, I means to
stand in with you, but you let that kid alone, or I plugs you!"

"Kid, huh!" grunted Hank. "Alfred a kid! I've hearn tell of him."

"What've you heard?" inquired the girl.

"He's th' plumb best scout on th' southern trail," replied Black Hank.

The year following, Billy Knapp, Alfred, and another man named Jim
Buckley took across to the Hills the only wagon-train that dared set out
that summer.

III

THE TWO CARTRIDGES

This happened at the time Billy Knapp drove stage between Pierre and
Deadwood. I think you can still see the stage in Buffalo Bill's show.
Lest confusion arise and the reader be inclined to credit Billy with
more years than are his due, it might be well also to mention that the
period was some time after the summer he and Alfred and Jim Buckley had
made their famous march with the only wagon-train that dared set out,
and some time before Billy took to mining. Jim had already moved to
Montana.

The journey from Pierre to Deadwood amounted to something. All day long
the trail led up and down long grassy slopes, and across sweeping,
intervening flats. While climbing the slopes, you could never get your
experience to convince you that you were not, on topping the hill, about
to overlook the entire country for miles around. This never happened;
you saw no farther than the next roll of the prairie. While hurtling
down the slopes, you saw the intervening flat as interminably broad and
hot and breathless, or interminably broad and icy and full of arctic
winds, according to the season of the year. Once in a dog's age you came
to a straggling fringe of cottonwood-trees, indicating a creek bottom.
The latter was either quite dry or in raging flood. Close under the hill
huddled two buildings, half logs, half mud. There the horses were
changed by strange men with steel glints in their eye