y?" suggested the Nueces infant.

"That's rather better than I hoped from you," nodded the Easterner,
approvingly. "The other meaning is that Buckley never goes into a
fight without giving away weight. He seems to dread taking the
slightest advantage. That's quite close to foolhardiness when you are
dealing with horse-thieves and fence-cutters who would ambush you any
night, and shoot you in the back if they could. Buckley's too full of
sand. He'll play Horatius and hold the bridge once too often some
day."

"I'm on there," drawled the Kid; "I mind that bridge gang in the
reader. Me, I go instructed for the other chap--Spurious Somebody--the
one that fought and pulled his freight, to fight 'em on some other
day."

"Anyway," summed up Broncho, "Bob's about the gamest man I ever see
along the Rio Bravo. Great Sam Houston! If she gets any hotter she'll
sizzle!" Broncho whacked at a scorpion with his four-pound Stetson
felt, and the three watchers relapsed into comfortless silence.

How well Bob Buckley had kept his secret, since these men, for two
years his side comrades in countless border raids and dangers, thus
spake of him, not knowing that he was the most arrant physical coward
in all that Rio Bravo country! Neither his friends nor his enemies had
suspected him of aught else than the finest courage. It was purely a
physical cowardice, and only by an extreme, grim effort of will had he
forced his craven body to do the bravest deeds. Scourging himself
always, as a monk whips his besetting sin, Buckley threw himself with
apparent recklessness into every danger, with the hope of some day
ridding himself of the despised affliction. But each successive test
brought no relief, and the ranger's face, by nature adapted to
cheerfulness and good-humour, became set to the guise of gloomy
melancholy. Thus, while the frontier admired his deeds, and his
prowess was celebrated in print and by word of mouth in many camp-
fires in the valley of the Bravo, his heart was sick within him. Only
himself knew of the horrible tightening of the chest, the dry mouth,
the weakening of the spine, the agony of the strung nerves--the never-
failing symptoms of his shameful malady.

One mere boy in his company was wont to enter a fray with a leg
perched flippantly about the horn of his saddle, a cigarette hanging
from his lips, which emitted smoke and original slogans of clever
invention. Buckley would have given a year's pay to attain that de