ridin' by the road if we were on horses and
in a hurry."

He paused and scanned the hills with an observant eye, while his
companion resumed the pumping process. The trough again filled, the
latter walked around the pails and joined him.

"Well, where does this trail start in?" he asked.

"He's goin' to show us as soon as he can get a minute's rest from that
bunch in there. Said we'd have to be shown. Said unless he could get
away long enough we'd have to wait till somebody he named came in, and
he'd head us into it."

They led the burros across the road and into the shadow of a cliff
where the morning sun, searching and fervid, did not reach, and threw
themselves to the ground, resting their backs against the foot wall,
and trying patiently to await the appearance of their guides. The
steady, hurried clink of glass and bottle on bar, the ribald shouts
and threats of the crowd that filled the road house, the occasional
burst of a maudlin song, all told the condition of the ejected placer
men who had stopped here on their journey.

"I don't know nothin' about the case, of course," drawled the big man
lazily, "and it's none of my funeral; but it does seem as if this
feller they call 'Bully' is quite some for havin' him own way."

He laughed softly as if remembering scraps of conversation he had
segregated from the murmur inside, and rolled his long body over until
he rested on his belly with the upper part of his torso raised on his
elbows.

"It appears that the courts down at the county seat gave a decision in
his favor, and that he lost about as much time gettin' action as a
hornet does when he's come to a conclusion. He just shows up with the
sheriff, and about twenty deputies, good and true, and says: 'Hike!
The courts say it's mine. These is the sheriffs. Off you go, and don't
waste no time doin' it, either!' And so they hikes and have got this
far, where they lay over for the night to comfort their insides with
somethin' that smelled like a cross between nitric acid, a corn farm,
and sump water. And it don't seem to cheer 'em up much, either,
because their talk's right ugly."

"But I thought you said they were heading for some other ground?"

"So they are, but they're takin' their time on the road. I used to be
that way till the day Arizona Bill plugged me because I was slow, all
through havin' stopped at a place too long. Then, says I, when I woke
up a month later in the Widder Haskins' back room: 'Bill