oach.

"Hello, pal!" he said gruffly; and Patsy wheeled like lightning, with a
gun already half drawn, to face him.

"Hello yourself!" he growled, not too cordially, and eying the newcomer
suspiciously. "Who are you lookin' for?"

The other came slowly forward without deigning to reply to this direct
question, and without so much as glancing again at Patsy; but he slung
his own bundle on the ground, and, after a moment, stalked away in the
gathering darkness again.

Presently he returned with another tie, which he dropped near the fire;
and then he looked sullenly toward Patsy.

"Share up, or chuck it alone?" he demanded, thrusting his hands deep
into his pockets.

"What you got?"

"As much as you have, and as good as you have."

"All right. I'm agreeable. Chuck it down."

Half an hour later, when it was almost dark, a third one appeared.

He was shorter and slimmer than the others, and the best dressed one of
the three, although he was disreputable enough in all conscience.

He came noisily over the fence from the track, and the two at the fire
could hear him long before he reached them. But they made no move.
Anybody who approached them with as much noise as that was not to be
dreaded, it appeared.

When he arrived within the circle of the firelight, he stopped and
strangely enough began to laugh; and he laughed on, boisterously,
amazingly, in fact; he laughed until there were tears in his eyes, and
until he had to hold to a sapling near him for support.

"Aw, what's eatin' you?" called out one of the men from the fire. "What
you see that's so funny; must be in your own globes. Come along inside
if you wants to, and don't stand there awakin' up the dead."

"I ain't got any chuck of my own," he called back to them. "I was
laughing to think how near I came to getting it--and didn't."

"Well, there's enough here for three--'r four, for that matter. Come in
and set down, pal."

And it was not until the meal was cooked, and spread out upon all sorts
of improvised arrangements, that the fourth member of the party
appeared--and he made his arrival in a most surprising manner.

He dropped literally among them, seemingly from the clouds--or the
tree--just as they were beginning to eat; and he squatted beside them,
and, reaching out without a word, helped himself to a hunk of the
toasted meat, which he began to tear viciously with his teeth.

"Nice guy, ain't he?" said Patsy, leering at the one with whom h