d
did he show the ravages of time?

And no one had wanted these mules, because they was inferior mules; but
when he was on the point of shooting them to stop their feed bill along
come two men that had a prospect over in the Bradshaw Mountains and
offered him a one third interest in it for his span. So he had sawed the
mules off onto these poor dubs and told 'em all right about the third
interest in their claim, and forget it; but they insisted on his taking
it. So he did, and was now working in the B.&.B. store at Prescott,
selling saddles and jewellery and molasses and canned fruit and lumber,
and such things. He didn't care much for the life, but it was neck-meat
or nothing with him now.

No wonder these men that cheated him out of his mules had made him take a
third interest in their claim. It was now taking all his salary to pay
assessments and other expenses on it. But he was trying to trade this
third interest off for something that wouldn't be a burden to him; then
he should have a chance to put his money by and come up to give Ben what
he was sooner or later bound to get if there was a just God in Heaven.
He spoke as freshly about Ben as if his trouble had begun the day before.
You wouldn't think twelve years had gone by. He was now saying Ben had
put a stigma on him. It had got to be a stigma by this time, though he
probably hadn't any idea what a stigma really is. He'd read it somewhere.

Then the waves closed over the injured man for about three years more.
This time it looked as if he'd gone down for good, stigma and all. Ben
thought the same. He said it was a great relief not to be looking forward
any more to these brutal affrays that Ed insisted on perpetrating. And
high time, too, because he was now in line for general manager, and how
would it look for him to be mixed up in brawls?

And everything was serene till the papers broke out into headlines about
a big strike made in the Bradshaw Mountains of Arizona by three partners,
of whom one was named Steptoe. They seemed to have found all the valuable
minerals in that claim of theirs except platinum. Ben tried first to
believe it was someone else named Steptoe; but no such luck. We read that
a half interest in the property had been sold to an Eastern syndicate for
three million dollars and a company organized of which Edward J. Steptoe
was president.

"It may be all for the best, anyway," Ben says to me. "Now that he's a
big mining man he'll probably