rn state's evidence they'd probable get off
light. Reckon we're going to round up the whole gang. Say, I thought
you'd hiked on to Garfield. I started back to your little old mine,
cut into your sign, and was followin' you up."

"Yes, I did start down all right. But I met up with a lad down here a
stretch and give him my papers and shackled on back. Damn your saddle
thieves, anyway--I sure wanted to go back and paw round that claim of
mine. My pack horse is back there hobbled, too."

"Aw, nemmine your pack horse. He'll make out till mornin'."

Ahead of them the wagon road was gouged into the side of an overhang
of promontory, under a saddleback pass to northward. A dim trail
curved away toward the pass. Adam's eye followed the trail. Caney's
horse fell back a step.

"There's where I found my mail carrier," said Adam; "up on top of that
little thumb. A Bar Cross waddy, he was--brandin' a calf."

Caney fired three times. The muzzle of his forty-five was almost
between Adam's shoulders. Adam fell sidewise to the left, he clutched
at his rifle, he pulled it with him as he fell. His foot hung in the
stirrup, his horse dragged him for a few feet. Then his foot came
free. He rolled over once, and tried to pull his rifle up. Then he lay
still with his face in the dust.

VIII

"Look on my face. My name is Might-Have-Been--
I am also called No-More, Too-Late, Farewell."
--_Credit Lost._

"It is a hard world," sighed Charlie See. "Life is first one thing and
then it is a broom factory."

They made a gay cavalcade of laughter and shining life, those four
young people. They had been to show Charlie over the gristmill and the
broom factory, new jewels in Garfield's crown, and now they turned
from deed to dream, rode merry for a glimpsing of to-morrow, where
Hobby Lull planned a conquest more lasting than Caesar's. Their way led
now beyond the mother ditch to lands yet unredeemed, which in the
years to come would lie under a high ditch yet to be. So they said and
thought. But what in truth they rode forth for to see was east of the
sun and west of the moon--not to be told here. Where youth rides with
youth under a singing sky the chronicle should be broad-spaced between
the lines; a double story, word and silence. To what far-off divine
event we move, there shall be no rapture keener than hoping time in
unspoiled youth.

The embankments of the mother ditch were he