ot from the stable
gloom an astounding figure in headlong flight. Its goal appeared to be
the bunk house fifty yards distant; but its course was devious, laid
clearly with a view to securing such incidental brief shelter as would
be afforded by the corral wall, by a meagre clump of buck-brush, by a
wagon, by a stack of hay. Good time was made, however. The fugitive
vanished into the bunk house and the door of that structure was slammed
to. But now the small puzzle I had thought to solve had grown to be, in
that brief space--easily under eight seconds--a mystery of enormous, of
sheerly inhuman dimensions. For the swift and winged one had been all
too plainly a correctly uniformed messenger boy of the Western Union
Telegraph Company--that blue uniform with metal buttons, with the
corded red at the trouser sides, the flat cap fronted by a badge of
nickel--unthinkable, yet there. And the speedy bearer of this scenic
investiture had been the desperate, blood-letting, two-gun bad man of
the Arrowhead.

It was a complication not to be borne with any restraint. I hastened to
stand before the shut door of the sanctuary. It slept in an unpromising
stillness. Invincibly reticent it seemed, even when the anguished face
of Jimmie Time, under that incredible cap with its nickeled badge,
wavered an instant back of the grimy window--wavered and vanished with
an effect of very stubborn finality. I would risk no defeat there. I
passed resolutely on to Boogles, who now most diligently trained up
tender young bean vines in the way they should go.

"Why does he hide in there?" I demanded in a loud, indignant voice. I
was to have no nonsense about it.

Boogles turned on me the slow, lofty, considering regard of a United
States senator submitting to photography for publication in a press that
has no respect for private rights. He lacked but a few clothes and the
portico of a capitol. Speech became immanent in him. One should not have
been surprised to hear him utter decorative words meant for the
rejoicing and incitement of voters. Yet he only said--or started to say:

"Little Sure Shot'll get that Chink yet! I tell you, now, that old boy
is sure the real Peruvian--"

This was absurdly too much. I then and there opened on Boogles, opened
flooding gates of wrath and scorn on him--for him and for his idol of
clay who, I flatly told him, could not be the real doughnuts of any
sort. As for his being the real Peruvian--Faugh!

Often I had w