l. Three of the Colorado volunteers playing billiards in a
prominent resort were deliberately annoyed and insulted by some merchant
sailors who had been drinking heavily at the expense of a short,
thick-set, burly fellow in a loud check suit and flaming necktie, a
stranger to the police, who knew of him only that he had landed from the
Doric and was waiting the coming of the Miowera from Vancouver for
Australia, and she was due on the morrow.

He had taken quarters at a second-rate sailors' lodging-house and at
first kept much to himself, but, once started to drinking with his
maritime neighbors, he became noisy and truculent, and sallied forth
with four of his new-found friends, all half drunk and wholly bent on
mischief.

The sight of three quiet-mannered young fellows playing pool in the
saloon was just the thing to excite all the blackguard instinct latent
in their half-sodden skins, and from sneering remark they had rapidly
passed to deliberate insult.

In less than a minute thereafter the three young volunteers, flushed and
panting, were surveying the police and bystanders busily engaged in
dragging out from under the tables and propping up some wrecks of
humanity, while the head devil of the whole business, the burly civilian
in the loud-checked suit, pitched headlong out of the rear window, was
stanching the blood from his broken nose at the hydrant of a neighboring
stable.

The volunteers were escorted to the landing with all honors, and their
antagonists, barring the ringleader, to the police station. The affair
was over so quickly that few had seen anything of it and only one man
had pitched in to the support of the soldiers--a civilian who came over
on the Vanguard by the authority of General Vinton, the ex-brakeman of
the Southern Pacific. While the Colorado men had little to say beyond
the statement that they had been wantonly insulted if not actually
assailed by a gang of strangers, the railway man was ablaze with
excitement and wrath over the escape of the leader of the vanquished
party.

"I've seen that cur-dog face of his somewhere before," said he, "and the
quicker you find him and nab him the better. That man's wanted in more
than one place, or I'm a duffer."

And so the police spent hours that night in search of the stranger, but
to no purpose. He kept in hiding somewhere, and their efforts were vain.
Search of his luggage at the lodging-house revealed the fact that he had
a lot of new shirt