es! Nine sinister
notches I counted--not fresh notches, but emphatic, eloquent, chilling.
I thrust the bloody record back on its gladdened owner.

"Never think it to look at me?" said he as our eyes hung above that grim
bit of bookkeeping.

"Never!" I warmly admitted.

"Me--I always been one of them quiet, mild-mannered ones that you
wouldn't think butter would melt in their mouth--jest up to a certain
point. Lots of 'em fooled that way about me--jest up to a certain point,
mind you--then, crack! Buryin' ground--that's all! Never go huntin'
trouble--understand? But when it's put on me--say!"

He lovingly replaced the weapon--with its mortuary statistics--doffed
the broad-brimmed hat with its snake-skin garniture, and placed a
forefinger athwart an area of his shining scalp which is said by a
certain pseudoscience to shield several of man's more spiritual
attributes. The finger traced an ancient but still evil looking scar.

"One creased me there," he confessed--"a depity marshal--that time they
had a reward out for me, dead or alive."

I was for details.

"What did you do?"

Jimmie Time stayed laconic.

"Left him there--that's all!"

It was arid, yet somehow informing. It conveyed to me that a marshal had
been cleverly put to needing a new deputy.

"Burying ground?" I guessed.

"That's all!" He laughed venomously--a short, dry, restrained laugh.
"They give me a nickname," said he. "They called me Little Sure Shot. No
wonder they did! Ho! I should think they would of called me something
like that." He lifted his voice. "Hey! Boogles!"

I had been conscious of a stooping figure in the adjacent vegetable
garden. It now became erect, a figure of no distinction--short, rounded,
decked in carelessly worn garments of no elegance. It slouched
inquiringly toward us between rows of sprouted corn. Then I saw that the
head surmounting it was a noble head. It was uncovered, burnished to a
half circle of grayish fringe; but it was shaped in the grand manner and
well borne, and the full face of it was beautified by features of a very
Roman perfection. It was the face of a judge of the Supreme Court or
the face of an ideal senator. His large grave eyes bathed us in a
friendly regard; his full lips of an orator parted with leisurely and
promising unction. I awaited courtly phrases, richly rounded periods.

"A regular hell-cat--what he is!"

Thus vocalized the able lips. Jimmie Time glowed modestly.

"Show him how I