iscarded
clothes of the highwaymen.

"Of course, this ain't going to help much," explained Carter,
deprecatingly. "But it does give you a fair idea of the height of those
fellows. Mat Bailey was in here the other day to help me with these
dummies. He seems to have a pretty good idea of what the men looked
like."

As his mission to San Francisco was confidential, and inasmuch as
Palmer's Mrs. Somers was an unknown quantity, Keeler refrained from
mentioning her. He proceeded to San Francisco that day; looked up Mrs.
Somers, who gave him the names and descriptions of a dozen bad men of
Nevada County; and the next day he returned to hunt up some of these
same bad men. One of them was O'Leary of You Bet, whom he found without
trouble. But he got very little encouragement from O'Leary; and he very
soon discovered how hard it is for an honest man to get any sort of
satisfaction from thieves and liars.

In the absence of any definite information he resolved to turn eastward,
across the Sierras. He was on the right track, as we know. As far as
Omaha it was not so very difficult to make a fairly thorough search for
the criminals. However, this took time, and although he happened to pick
up information here and there about a couple of rather odd-looking
Californians traveling eastward with gold, he often felt that he was on
a fool's errand. He fell in with Californians everywhere. If the
building of the transcontinental railroad had served no other purpose,
it had sent a steady stream of people away from the gold fields--a
circumstance that made his mission seem all the more hopeless. Among so
many how could he distinguish the criminals? True, he could distinguish
an ex-miner among a thousand. And whenever such a man extended his right
hand and said, "Put it there, partner!" Keeler could not refuse the
proffered hand-clasp.

At Louisville he encountered a man whom he was sure he had seen in
Nevada City. The man evidently recognized him also, and for an instant
Keeler thought he saw a wild gleam in the man's eye. Then it was, "Put
it there, partner!" and Keeler placed his clean right hand into the
grimy palm indicated.

"The drinks are on me, this morning," said the man, marching him off to
the nearest bar. And Keeler was so much in the humor of the thing that
he was soon telling the story of the Frenchman who took lessons in
English from a Kentuckian:

"What do you say in Anglais when one offer you a drink, and you accep'