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 "Here—we'll sling your arm in that business you wore around your neck," Dr. Hall said to the patient, picking up the bright-figured silk article from the floor. "You'd better cut out the booze till this thing heals, or you're likely to lose your hand. There's no doctor in Simrall they tell me. I'd advise you to hop the first train to Dodge and have it attended to there."

Not a word out of the glum, ill-favored mouth, not a shake of the head, not a shading of good will or gratitude in the savage, slow-blinking eyes. But there was a new alertness about the man which Dr. Hall was not slow to see. He was listening intently to the noise of scraping feet on the hard cinder road before the door.

Hall thought there was a movement as of men collecting at that point. He concluded that they had recovered their guns and their courage, and were waiting for Sandiver to come out. The fellow's pistol lay on a chair over against the wall, hidden by his dusty sombrero, where Hall had thrown them when he followed the jerries in with their burden. Hall went and got them, giving the hat to its owner, retaining the gun, not quite decided what to do with it, instrument fit for only a coward's hand, he thought.

While Hall was deliberating over what to do with the gun, somebody knocked on the door, striking it in rude and insistent demand with something hard, very likely the butt of a gun, the doctor believed. Sandiver sat a little straighter in the chair, moving one foot in his stealthy, sneaking way from the rest, as if he calculated on making a spring, recovering his gun and fighting his way out.

Dr. Hall broke the pistol, throwing the shells with a clatter to the floor. The summons sounded on the door

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 again. Sandiver—Hall was convinced he was nobody else—lifted his other foot with as much caution as if the slightest noise would be fatal to his hopes, and stood.

Hall threw back the spring-bolt and opened the door, which had been reënforced since Old Doc Ross' assault on it and made thick to withstand violence. But he opened it only a little way, not far enough to give them a look into the car, blocking that small opening with his body to guard against a rush.

"We want Sandiver," said a man in front of the crowd.

He was a stranger to Hall, a mild-looking, fatherly sort of man with a beard. He was holding a railroad spike in his hand, with which he evidently had made the alarming thump on the door.

"Are you the sheriff?" Hall inquired.

"No, I ain't," the man answered, as mildly as he appeared, yet with something portentous in the very control of his voice. He gave the instant impression of having been abroad in the night on such business as that before.

"I'll have to ask you to wait a few minutes yet, gentlemen. I'm not quite through with him."

Hall was peering into the crowd, trying to see whether Larrimore and the others were there. The one lantern still hung on the stake beside the platform, fifty or sixty feet away, making a confusion of shadows among them. There appeared to be thirty or forty in the crowd, but Hall was not able to identify many. There was a hat like Larrimore's off a little way, and a dicer that surely belonged to Fergus. Kraus' bear-like figure Hall could not pick out among them.

"He'll do the way he is, Doctor," the spokesman said.

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 "Just a minute, and I'll be with you," Hall said, politely but decisively, closing the door as he spoke.

Hall turned to his patient, who stood as he had left the chair, his head within a span of the car roof, his meanness intensified by the trap he found himself in, with men clamoring at the door for his life. He did not merit a defensive word, a moment's risk, Hall knew, for he was altogether unworthy, outcast and defiled. But if there was any way to help him get out of the mob's hands he was going to send him off with a whole neck. Not for Gus Sandiver's sake, but for his own.

The jerries could not be called into the case to help him. It was not their affair; it would be ungenerous to ask them to take a risk for this old prairie rattlesnake, who was guilty of no knowing how many atrocious crimes. But hold on a minute. How about Nance? Had that bullet got him at the window? Was this knocking, this subdued, mild-spoken request for Sandiver based on something more than a desire to strike a stunning blow in their petty squabble over the county seat?

They were knocking again, growing impatient, suspicious. Some had gone to the back door; others had ranged along the sides of the car as if to prevent any escape by the windows, which would have been a squeeze for even Sandiver, snaky as he was. Dr. Hall called a cheerful assurance that he would be with them in a minute.

Even if Nance had been killed, he argued, it would not do to pass Sandiver over to the crowd. There would be another inquest, the humorists of the town would swear Sandiver died of the injury he got when Hall heaved him into the track. If Sandiver had shot Nance,

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 then he must go to jail, and he must go in no other company than Dr. Andrew Hall's. If Nance had escaped harm, then Sandiver must be put on his horse and turned loose to get out of town if he could do it.

"Sandiver, you've got yourself in a hell of a fix by coming over here to shoot up this dance," Hall said. "If you've killed the station agent, I can't save you; if you haven't, I'll do the best I can."

Sandiver did not answer. He stood glum and scowling, arm slung across his chest in the gaudy neckerchief, looking around the room for something to lay his hand to, his scalded eyes coming back to the pistol Dr. Hall held in his hand. Long since Old Doc Ross's gun had been taken down from its conspicuous place on the wall, where it had hung waiting for its owner to come and ask for it. It was lying at the bottom of the little closet, and Hall was thankful it was out of sight.

They were growling at the door, threatening to break it down. Hall believed they would hesitate some time before attempting that, knowing he was armed with Sandiver's gun. He tried to make his voice sound cheerful and friendly when he sung out that he was through, and coming.

Still he did not know just what to do, just how to bluff it through. One thing about it: they were not going to hang Sandiver, and then swear he was dead before they strung him up, or that he died on the way to jail.

There was a big sponge in a basin, standing on a box beside the chair, lately used in cleansing Sandiver's wound. Dr. Hall snatched a large bottle from his cupboard, swung around and opened the door. He threw it wide open, the light of his lamp striking the foremost of

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 the crowd so strongly they drew aside out of it, making a little channel the width of the door. Dr. Hall stood before them, the pistol in one hand, the big dark bottle in the other.

Nance, the station agent, was down at the farther end of this little lane. He hopped nimbly aside into the dark. Part of Hall's perplexities cleared away. He stood in the door, Sandiver remaining where he had planted himself after leaving the chair.

"Gentlemen, I'm not going to trust any more committees in this town to take my prisoners to jail," Dr. Hall announced in friendly, calm voice. He stuck the pistol in his waistband as he spoke, nobody but Sandiver knowing it was as harmless as the whiskered citizen's spike.

"We'll see he gets there, all right, Doc," somebody said, lightly assuring, the way one speaks to a child when playing to deceive it. The irrepressible humor of Damascus was beginning to spout.

"Pass him out here, and don't do so damn much stallin' around!" another demanded.

Dr. Hall turned to the basin, poured generously from the big bottle upon the sponge; picked it up, and turned to the door again. They fell away with a scramble before him, his movement was at once so determined, confident and threatening. He faced them, the dripping sponge in his hand.

"Gentlemen, I turned a man over to a crowd of you not so very long ago," he said, "a man by the name of Bud Sandiver. When that man left my hands he wasn't half as badly hurt as this one is, but five or six men swore he dropped dead on the way to the jail door, and he didn't have over fifty feet to go. You thought it was

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 a pretty good joke to swear the killing of that man off on my hands. I tell you, gentlemen, you're not going to put another joke like that over on me to-night. I'll take this man to jail myself. When we step out of this door, you spread out and stay spread."

Dr. Hall made a motion of menace: with the dripping sponge; it was followed by a rasping and scurrying of feet. No mob is valiant; no man is courageous before a mystery. Hall took Gus Sandiver by the arm and marched him out, slamming the office door shut after him, the spring lock shutting up the secret of the big black bottle.

"Go to your horse," Hall whispered.

Fortunately, the way to the horse was the way to jail. The old horse-thief had tied his animal to a telegraph pole behind a screening pile of ties, close by the side of Custer Street. Hall had him in the saddle, the reins thrown around his neck, the unloaded pistol thrust into his undamaged hand, before the bluffed crowd, slowly reassembling a cautious distance behind, gathered what was going on.

A kick of the spurs and Sandiver had a big stack of steel rails between him and the baffled humorists of Damascus. The few shots they chucked in his direction did him no more harm than if they had been fired into the ground. Alone Gus Sandiver had ridden into Damascus, alone he rode out of it. He had not spared his rescuer a word, either a blessing or a curse.

Dr. Hall returned to his office deliberately, the scuffing of feet in the gloom around him like the noise of stalking beasts which lack the courage to spring; opened his door and threw the sponge in the basin, corked the dark

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 bottle and stood it in its place on the shelf. He stood before the open cupboard a moment, his legs spread in his ungainly way, lifting himself to his toes in that silent, self-satisfied flexing of the muscles which seemed so much like the exercise of a caged tiger eager for some contest worthy its untried strength.

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being wash day for the jerries, it was quiet that morning around the train. Nearly all the men were scattered along the river, washing out their extra shirts and overalls, modestly screened from the eyes of Mrs. Charles and her daughters by the willows, only their voices discovering their presence as they carried on jests and conversations in loud voice from point to point.

The regulation shirt for the jerry of those days was heavy wool cloth, generally navy-blue, a double-breasted garment with two rows of shell buttons, which a modern wringer would have made woeful damage among. There was an arrangement for throwing back the bosom flap to admit the breeze to a jerry's throat and chest. It was a very happy arrangement, a most satisfactory garment.

Two shirts of that sort would wear a jerry half a year, the only drawback about them being the length of time required to dry them, spread out on a bush or hooked along the wire of the railroad fence. This made winter washing entirely out of the question, a hardship that bore lightly on most of the jerries, indeed.

Many of these garments were variously and gayly patched as they blew in the sun that Sunday morning, for each jerry was his own tailor. He cut up old overalls and the arms of old shirts to repair the damage of time and mischance. There were always two parts of

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 a jerry's garments which long outwore the rest: the sleeves of his shirt, and that portion of his overalls which he sat upon.

A jerry worked with sleeves rolled up. Even in the sunny days of winter he laid the muscles of his brave forearms bare to winds which would have daunted the hardiest sailor that ever rounded the Horn. An old-time jerry was smothered with his sleeves about his wrists. It was no workin' weather for a man when he couldn't strip up the flannel and let the breeze to his skin. As for sitting down, there was not much of his life dedicated to that sport. He was away at seven in the morning, on the job till six at evening; in his bunk taking his repose as soon as it was dark enough to hide him, as it was currently expressed, from the boogs.

Gallaher had been sent away on the early morning fast train to the hospital at Topeka, somewhat assured by the hopeful manner of Dr. Hall. Hall was vastly relieved to see the poor fellow on his way. The jerries would accept it as the expected when word came back to them that Gallaher's foot had been taken off in the hospital. To them a hospital was a place of dark atrocities and heartless impositions, few of them having been in one, the old traditions and fears filling such place with horrors to the doors. A hospital could bear their curses and deep denunciations; it would be a hard matter for a lone doctor on the works.

Dr. Hall was feeling in pretty good form that morning. His pipe tasted good to him; there was hearty anticipation in the scents of roasting beef and mince pies which came out of the kitchen on wheels. Mary and Annie were flying back and forth across the door, as on

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 the day he first saw them, as they would continue flying on their tasks which came up day after day like some redundant growth of weeds in a field that no faithful application of the hoe can overcome, until somebody came along and married them, and carried them away to flit back and forth across other kitchen doors.

There would be no getting away from that flying in all haste to serve the hunger of mankind for Annie and Mary. They were mother birds serving a brood that imposed on them in loutish exaction, too simple ever to discover the fraud that fate and men had connived against them before they were born into their cabbage-and-beef saturated world.

Dr. Hall sat in the front door of his office, as Little Jack Ryan had sat the night before smoking his festival cigar, watching Annie and Mary as they came and went, thinking these thoughts of them, holding it a pity that the future had so little in store for them, unless by some extraordinary deflection from the charted course, when they deserved so much more for their years of ministration to the overgrown, greedy brood of men. So he sat, back against the jamb, probably more comfortable for the knowledge, not even subconsciously admitted, that fate had plotted a more agreeable voyage for him than for Annie and Mary, rushing like ants about their work.

And the most agreeable thought, the most pleasant reflection of that bright Sunday morning, was that he was not obliged to remain in that country west of Dodge. He was free to pick up and leave it on a few days' notice to the company. He was not bound there by any far-projected hope; his happiness was not centered in a quarter-section of that mangy land.

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 That thought was as comfortable as money put away in a safe place. He was a free man in a land that would make slaves of men in their labor of subduing it, ruin many of them and break their hearts, to cast them off in a tattered vagabondage, as other regions of that vast prairie had done by other men within the confines of the immense parallelogram called Kansas.

Charley Burnett was approaching, coming from the depot, where a little gang of loafers had collected in anticipation of the west-bound train, which would stop for water. Its news-butcher would alight in black alpaca coat and cap, like some impertinent young crow, offering newspapers from the centers of midwestern civilization.

The warm sun had brought Burnett out without his coat. He was wearing a white shirt with extremely full sleeves, which were drawn up baggily at the elbows by fancy elastic bands. He came swaggering down the slope of the platform, hands in his pockets, his narrow-brimmed straw hat pushed back to show the elegant sweep of hair that came down in a sleek-plastered loop over his left eye. Hall felt there was something obscene about the fellow; it seemed to be his legs.

Burnett was not grinning this morning, although there was a bland, patronizing expression in his face, a natural endowment that gave him the look of an affable good fellow in the eyes of men and women of a certain type. He stopped a few feet away from Hall's door, saying nothing, just standing with hands in his pockets in a thoughtful way, as if he turned the advisability of some contemplated action in his mind. Hall ignored him, caring little about the man, one way or another, neither curious nor annoyed by his silence.

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 "Hall, you kind of turned one over on the boys last night, didn't you?" Burnett said at last, facing around with his one-sided grin. "They're sore as hell on you for that little trick."

"It's a calamity, but I guess I'll live through it," Hall replied, his sarcasm not altogether lost on the late telegraph operator who had become the most sensational capitalist in the livestock industry.

"It ain't no joke, I'm here to tell you, Hall. The boys kep' hands off that old skunk on your word you'd take him to jail. Some of us had hard work to hold 'em back when they heard old Gus lope off."

"You might have let them go," Hall said quietly. "My interest in him ended when I got him on his horse."

"It wasn't him they wanted," Burnett sneered at the meddling stranger's simplicity, "it was you!"

"I wouldn't hang well, I'm afraid," Hall said.

"You'd purty darn certain had a chance to try it out if some of us hadn't held 'em back! They wanted to burn this shack over your head."

"Nice of you to come and tell me, Burnett."

Hall was undisturbed by the news, entirely unmoved except for a little edging of sarcasm to his words which nettled Burnett more than an angry retort.

"I don't pretend to be nice about it, Hall. Some of us stood between you and that crowd last night, but I'm here to tell you it won't happen that way twice."

"I don't feel myself under any obligation to you for your interference, Burnett, if you did interfere, which I doubt. I'm entirely capable of taking care of myself."

"You looked like it! Where'd you been at if one of

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 the boys hadn't took a shot at Gus Sandiver when he was throwin' his gun down on you?"

Hall got up, almost eagerly. He put out his hand in a quick, impulsive gesture, which Burnett plainly mistook for an overture of peace. He twitched his crooked lips in a derisive grin, backing out of reach.

"If you know who it was, send him to me," Hall requested earnestly, his appealing hand enforcing the sincerity of his words. "I'm under a great obligation to that man. I want to thank him."

"He's not out for any thanks," Burnett returned stiffly.

"Tell him, anyhow, Burnett, that I do thank him. He meant well, but I wasn't in any danger. Sandiver's gun was empty when I rushed him. He fired his last shot at Nance."

Burnett looked foolish, flushing angrily at this confident declaration, coming so close on the acknowledgment of service to the unknown shooter. He doubtless had overlooked the doctor's possession of Sandiver's gun immediately after the shooting. It took the sting out of his insolence, the triumph out of his bluff.

"Like hell!" he said, stalling for a new foothold.

"Yes. The shells are lying right there on the floor where they fell when I broke the gun. The gun was empty when I put it in Sandiver's hand. He couldn't have hurt a fly."

Hall pushed the door open, pointing to the empty cartridges.

"That would be darn poor evidence to save your neck on if you was up for murder," Burnett said.

"I'm not up for murder, Burnett."

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 "It'll be just about as hot for you if you don't keep your hands out of this town's business. You're an outsider, Hall; you don't belong. If you don't keep your fingers out of our pie you're liable to get 'em burnt."

"Last night's affair wasn't any of the town's business," Hall reminded him, coldly. "That man was on railroad property, shooting at a railroad man. I'm a railroader; it was my duty to put a stop to it if I could. The town didn't send an officer down here to arrest Sandiver. The marshal wasn't even in sight, keen as he is to loaf around the depot in the daytime. Sandiver was my prisoner. If you've got any case against him, send the sheriff after him with a warrant."

"I've always noticed," Burnett said, "that the crook they've got the stiffest case against has the most to say. But your talk won't get you anywhere in this town, Hall. You're due to meet a whole lot of trouble if you don't stick to your railroadin' and leave this town to run its own business. That's my tip to you."

"I didn't come here looking for trouble, Burnett. This damn country took me by the neck and pulled me into it the minute I arrived. It isn't my county seat war, I'm not trying to horn into it because I like a row. I wouldn't give a dime for your town if I had to take the people with it, I wouldn't give four dollars for the whole county if I had to live in it to make my title good. But I don't recognize the right of any man, or bunch of men, especially a bunch of petty gamblers and cheap sports, to tell me where I head in. If you're here as a delegate, take that back to the gang that sent you; if you're here on your own responsibility, put it in your pipe and smoke it."

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 Hall stood lifting himself to his toes; lifting and lowering, lifting and lowering, like a duck preening itself on a sunny bank. There was no other sign of mental turmoil about him; his face was calm, and expressive of the self-confidence which his defiance implied. He seemed merely to be working off an excess of spirits in the rapid levitation, the cinders making a grinding noise under the soles of his brightly polished shoes.

Burnett put his hand in his pocket, drew out his diamonds and began winnowing them from palm to palm, his face flushed, the nonchalance he attempted only a bluff.

"Oh, hell!" he said, in the sneering discount of a man who has no answer in an argument. It is the small person's last shot, into which he compresses his declaration of fatuity in contending against a fool. To such a man or woman, the person who disagrees is always wrong.

"First, you people in this town side-step a murder and hang it on to me. You can't crack a man on the head when his hands are tied and get away with it under any easier name, I tell you, Burnett. And you slinking cowards in this little outcast burg swore it off on me. That was your first offense."

"You'd better go easy on that line of talk, Hall," Burnett advised.

"Next, you set Old Doc Ross on me, hoping to see him chase me down the track a mile or two. Poor old soak, he thought he was putting on the big show for the bums and four-flushers of this town."

Burnett's pink face lost its color. He put his spoonful of diamonds in his pocket, his mouth shut tight as if he compressed it on something better left unsaid. He looked

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 away, as if the sight of the cool egotist before him might provoke an outburst that would be unseemly to his financial dignity, his eyes on the hills across the river. Presently he turned.

"Meanin' me?" he asked, his voice threateningly calm, as the voice of a man who has made up his mind to fight.

"You're free to apply it wherever you think it fits, Burnett."

"You're makin' some purty wide charges for a man that don't know any more about the people of this town than you do, Hall. Between me and you it'll pass—this one time. But when you make a talk about four-flushers and cheap gamblers again, you take pains to make exceptions to me—by name."

"I seem to recall another time," said Hall, a little laughing jeer in his tone, "when you made a big front warning me how I must talk about you. I haven't heard anything drop."

"You'll hear it, all right all right! And let me pass this out to you: Stick to your business down here with the railroaders. We've got our own doctor up-town."

Burnett put an end to the altercation with that, leaving his warning with Hall, to do what he liked about it. Hall stood at his door, looking after Burnett as he went swaggering back to the depot, feeling a contracting coldness coming over his spirits, portending more trouble for him in that miserable patch of scurvy town.

"Poor business to stand here jawing with that man," he thought.

Poor and undignified business, indeed, wrangling like an old woman, full of vain words, and declarations which time might check up on him with a demand to make good.

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 Only a few minutes ago he had been sitting there in complacent comfort, congratulating himself on being free to leave that country at any time. But the prospect of leaving it under the threats of four-flushers like Burnett was not at all to his taste. It appeared as if the country first had laid hold of him and pulled him into its troubles, and now was conspiring to keep him there. For he was not the one to take to his heels before any common pack of yelping curs.

Not at all, said Dr. Andrew Hall; not at all. He lifted himself to the tips of his polished shoes again, drawing a deep breath, his complacency returning, his serenity restored. Not at all, said he; not at all.

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looked in at the boxcar office as he was passing, he said, after the west-bound train had gone on its way to California. He found Dr. Hall comfortably seated in his surgical chair, the floor around him strewn with newspapers, the small doings of Damascus forgotten in the news of that other division of the nation east of Dodge.

Jim was dressed in his formal Sunday clothes, which appeared that morning to be largely a big-chested white shirt without a collar, the neckband of it clasped and locked as securely as the section boss' tool-house door by an onyx-ornamented arrangement with a spring top. He wore no coat, but a vest that was a considerable garment in its own right, being of green velvet, elaborately dressed with buttons of some metallic substance resembling zinc. Straps of strong suspenders were displayed with assurance below the vest, attesting that Jim's mournful, large-legged trousers were there to stay.

When Jim stepped, a movement of something stiff and tubular, like a joint of stovepipe, could be noted inside his trouser legs below the knees. Like a true, old-fashioned Missouri gentleman, Jim wore boots, hiding the tops of them away in this manner. He prided himself on his boots, and his way of concealing the tops of them under his pantaloons, feeling distinguished and superior

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 in his peculiar habit in a country where men tucked the bottoms of their trousers out of sight within their boots as if shame attended the display.

There once was a politician in Missouri who wore his boots in this fashion, hiding their tops away like a scandal. He walked through office after office in that state on no other virtue than his boots. Wearing boots when and where other men wore shoes made him famous in his day. He died at last in Washington, whither his boots had carried him, his nose in the public crib as the seventeenth assistant secretary of something, his boots on his feet. Justice had unbounded admiration for that man, whom he resembled in a way and was aware of it. If boots had made one man famous, why shouldn't they do as much for two?

Jim's feet were small, his boots tight over the insteps and wrinkled elegantly around the ankles; his trousers were long, rolled up in several turns as if he kept a quantity of cloth by him for an emergency. Over all he wore a smoky-dun hat that once had been white, with a broad brim and high, round crown.

This hat was not the happiest touch that Jim could have given his ensemble. Under it his bulging jowls and drowned-looking, slovenly mustache were not at their best, nature having assembled his features for a headpiece of a different sort. A cap with ear-muffs, Dr. Hall thought, looking at his visitor's portly figure in the door.

"No," Jim declined, when Dr. Hall offered him the chair, "I'll set over here in the door. I don't see how you can set there and take your ease in that chair, Doc. I'll be busted if I could. I'd be thinkin' all the time somebody was goin' to make a grab for one of my teeth. Well,

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 I reckon docterin' hardens a man. I've heard said it does."

"Yes, doctors and hotel men have a hard name," Hall agreed.

"Maybe a hotel man ain't as hard as his name sometimes," Jim said. "Take me: some of these people in this town think I'd drill the fillin's out of a man's teeth for a hotel bill, and here I've been down here this morning tryin' to give my blamed hotel away to a widder woman."

"You talk like she wouldn't take it."

"She wouldn't. That's the joke of it; she wouldn't."

"What's the occasion for all this liberality? Not going to quit us, are you?"

"If I could make that boardin'-train widder see money when it's spread out in her lap before her eyes, I would. I offered her the hotel as a gift, free gratis, if she'd buy the furnishin's. No; don't know nothing about a standin'-still boardin' house, she says."

"And that's a pretty good reason for letting it alone, too. If you can't make money out of it, how do you expect anybody else to?"

"Things is due to pick up in this town when the railroad makes this a division point and puts in a roundhouse and shops. Farley was tellin' me a few days ago it's all settled, provided we win the county seat in the election, and it's a cinch we will. It seems the company's made a deal to give it to Simrall if they beat us, but that was only to quiet 'em down, Farley says. They ain't got a chance in a thousand of beatin' us."

"Yes, Farley was telling me the same thing the other day. He says the company has been pestered and wor-

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 ried by county seat towns, and aspirants for county seat honors, all the way across Kansas. So they compromise the difficulty on promising what favors there are to be handed out to the winner where they have a contest on, like you have here. Queer situation, it seems to me."

"Not so danged funny as it might look to a one-eyed man. We've got our investments laid out in this town, and if we lose the county seat we'll bust. But we're not goin' to lose, and that's a cinch. This town'll be full of lay-over trainmen and shop mechanics when the company makes it a division point. That woman knows railroaders, she knows how to give 'em what they want. I thought I'd give her the first shot at it, but she wouldn't take a gift out of your hand if you wrapped it up in a silk hankachief."

"If you can see all that prosperity looming up, why not stay on and make your own fortune out of the hotel?"

"Well, Doc," Jim said confidentially, "I've closed out my cattle interests and sold my ranch. The hotel it's been a kind of a side-line with me, not enough in it to keep a man that's used to hittin' my gait busy. And that's the way it stands."

"I hope you did well," Hall said perfunctorily, in the way a man speaks when he has no interest in another's affairs.

"Yes, I think I made a purty good deal. I throwed in with Charley Burnett in his new company—he's makin' a company out of it now, you know."

"No, I didn't," said Hall, his interest growing lively.

"Yes, Charley's lettin' a few of his friends in with him. He's been makin' more money than any one man needs."

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 "I hope he'll keep it up—for the sake of his friends."

"Charley ain't got started on his way yet. He's goin' to be one of the biggest men in this country, he's goin' to wring the tails of some of them Kansas City sharpers that's been layin' down the law to us cattlemen out here in this country west of Dodge the past five or six years. Charley's the feller that's goin' to show 'em cattlemen can stand on their own legs, and make their own terms when it comes to loans and commissions, I'm here to say."

"I don't know," Hall said abstractedly; "I never knew their methods." He wondered how much of this confidence in Burnett was justified; whether it was founded on what he had accomplished, or the front he made with his handful of diamonds and his bluff. "So you took stock in the new company, instead of cash, for your ranch and cattle, did you?"

"It's better than dollar for dollar," Justice declared with such force one might have thought his security had been questioned. "I'll double on it between now and fall if I want to turn it loose."

"I wish you all kinds of luck," Hall said, but not with the honest warmth of unreserved faith.

"It ain't luck,'it's know-how," Jim said, full of confidence to the neck. "That's why I want to let loose of that blame hotel. Time for a feller that's worked all his life as hard as I have to pull in to the bank and take a rest. If I could git shut of my hotel I'd go back east and settle down."

"Back to Missouri, heh?"

"No, I wouldn't aim to go clear back east. I guess Dodge'd be fur enough for me. I used to be there in the old days. Guess the town'd be kind of quiet to me

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 now, everything shut up. Made me think of it last night when that old raw-backed Gus tried to pull off some of the old-time religion. He might 'a' got you, too, if that dang little 'Lisabeth hadn't took a crack at him when he was swingin' down on you."

"Elizabeth? Why, it couldn't have been Elizabeth, Jim. She wasn't here."

Hall spoke with the calm certainty of one who had his data right. If there was any feeling evident in his manner it was one of mild amusement at Jim, who appeared to have replaced mystery with certainty since last night, in his determination to make Elizabeth fit the reputation he had given her.

"Who else?" Jim wanted to know, a large challenge in his tone. "Who else is there in this town, or anywhere around here, could stand off that fur and crack a man through the arm the first shot? And do it by lantern light, too!"

"I don't know about that," Hall admitted, still unmoved, "but I know she wasn't here. She promised me to ride down and look on a while, but I guess she changed her mind."

"She was right here, all right," Jim said, entirely sure of himself. "I seen her over on the edge of the crowd by them rails, settin' on her horse as plain as that pile of kegs. You was tinkerin' around with that Irishman in your hospital over there."

"Maybe she was here then, but she'd gone when I came back. I looked all around for her and couldn't find her."

"She loped back when she heard that shootin'," Jim said positively. The sound of shootin' 's the same to that girl as a brass band to a kid."

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 "Have you ever seen her in any shooting scrapes, or is this just hearsay?"

Hall was severe. He frowned like a cross-examining lawyer as he bored Justice with a challenging look.

"I wasn't right there, but I was in town. That was four or five years ago."

"Why, she wasn't anything but a kid four or five years ago."

"She was wild when she was young. She was brought up wild, and I guess she always will be wild."

"Was that the time she shot the cigar?"

"That was the time," Jim said, nodding soberly. "She come to the post office one day wearin' a pair of them straddle-leggid women's britches—you know the kind I mean, the kind that looks like they're all one piece till they straddle a horse, then they look like two women."

"Divided skirts, I think they call them, Jim. A very sensible arrangement for riding, I think."

"I wouldn't feel right if any relation of mine was to come out in public with 'em on, Doc. I guess that's what the feller thought when he made a remark as she went in the post office. She let that crack go by, but when the same feller got off something funny when she come out, she spun around on her heel and shot the see-gar out of his mouth as purty as you could 'a' knocked it out with your hand."

"He was lucky she didn't shoot his darned head off. I think he got about what was coming to him."

"I ain't sayin' he didn't, Doc. I don't approve passin' remarks about the women-folks when they go by, no matter if they do put on things that provoke men to say something. I won't stand for it, not a second. I'd

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 boot a man clean to the middle of the street if he was to shoot his mouth off in the hearin' of any lady that passed my place, I don't care if she had pants up to her knees."

"That's the spirit!" Hall applauded.

"But I ain't sayin' at the same time I approve of 'em puttin' on britches, wide or narrer. But all the women-folks in this country do it now," Jim sighed, shaking his head for the delicacy of the ladies west of Dodge. "I seen a woman—she was a young woman, too, and purty, purty as a peach—in here the other day wearin' overhauls, a pair of plain, blue-drillin' man's overhauls! She was drivin' a span of mules, handlin' 'em as good as I ever seen a man pull a gee-string over a jinny in my life."

"One of these newcomers, I suppose. I think she was a very sensible woman."

"Did you see her?" Jim inquired, in a tone at once depreciating and challenging, as if he questioned the right to approve her on a mere matter of report.

"No; I wish I had."

"I don't know how men as you take 'em feels when they see a woman steppin' around that way, but I know I felt like I wanted to sneak off. A woman with britches on always makes me think she's got something missin' behind, like a horse with a docked tail. I was so ashamed for that woman I felt ashamed of myself."

"You're altogether too modest," Hall laughed. "But how did that little shooting scrape of Elizabeth's come out? Did the old major go gunning for the smart guy?"

"No. No, the old man didn't take no more notice of it than if she'd shot a rabbit. He brought that girl up to

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 take care of herself, and knew she could do it, I guess. He never would 'a' been able to overtake the feller, anyhow. He was a cow-puncher from up north of here somewhere, in with some cattle to load. He drawed his time and lit out inside of thirty minutes. I never heard of anybody else gittin' fresh with that girl since then. They seem to kind of pass the word along."

"Very good," Hall approved.

"Yes, that made a name and a fame for 'Lisabeth out here west of Dodge."

"Was that the only wild scrape you ever heard of her being mixed up in?"

"The only shootin' scrape I ever heard of her bein' in. But she's rairin' to mix up in 'em every time she hears a gun pop. I've seen that girl come a ridin' in here with a gang of cow-punchers off the range when the old man was in the cattle business, whoopin' and hollerin' as loud as any of 'em, racin' 'em down Custer Street to the depot and back to the square, kickin' up dust till you'd think a cyclone'd struck town. What do you call that if it ain't wild?"

"Youthful spirits, I'd say. So you think she pegged old Gus through the arm last night, do you, Jim?"

"I'd nearly bet a dime it was her," Jim replied, with something of his native insolence, so contemptuously shown in the first days of Hall's dealings with him, carefully suppressed under a sham of familiar friendliness lately, which Hall accepted for what it was worth.

"Maybe you're right," Hall acceded, thinking it best to let the question stand for answer from another source.

Jim was not inclined to let go of a thing that gave him so much pleasure. He went over the ground of last night's

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 disturbance again, with a nod or a word now and then from Hall, which sufficed very well to keep him going. Jim was about as good a one-sided talker as ever came out of his loquacious state. One thing suggested another to him, which made his conversation as sprangling as a big raindrop on a rock.

"Whoever did the shooting under the impression that I was in danger might as well have saved the ammunition, Jim," Hall said at last, tired of hearing the endless fellow harp on the subject. "As I told Burnett a little while ago, Sandiver fired the last shot in his gun at Nance."

"He did?" said Jim, incredulity and disappointment comically mingled in his voice, in the astonishment of his belligerent features.

"Sure. I played safe. I stood in the dark and counted his shots, then rushed him. He didn't have any more chance to hurt me than a rabbit."

"You did?" said Jim, his countenance falling, the small look about him of a man who had been sold.

"There the shells are, right where they fell when I broke his gun to make sure it didn't have a load in it before I opened the door to speak to you fellows. I didn't want to have a loaded gun around me, I wasn't out to hurt anybody."

Jim was a little more curious, if not entirely so skeptical, than Burnett had been. He went in and picked up the shells, collecting them in his palm, where he stirred them with his stubby finger as if mixing some dose of destruction for an enemy.

"I reckon them's them," he said.

"Yes, I'm no kind of a hero, and I'm not in debt to anybody in Damascus for my life."

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 "Hum-m-m," said Jim, moving the shells around with his finger like a farmer looking over a sample of seed-corn, "Well, if these is them, how did old Gus come to slip one rim-fire in his gun?" Jim held up a shell, a look of stern accusation in his eyes.

"Why, I don't know," Hall replied, a feeling over him far different from the curiosity he attempted to feign. "Did he?"

"No, he never!" Jim declared. "Counted the shots! You never counted no shots. I saw Gus slippin' shells in his gun a minute before he took that crack at Nance—pity he didn't hit him, too!"

"What's the difference?" Hall inquired, taking the shell in question from Jim, looking at it with interest wholly genuine, no pretense in that phase of it at all.

Jim ignored the foolish question, the answer to it being plain to anybody who had the sense of touch.

"It might 'a' went off, I guess it could 'a' went off," speculatively, "but I wouldn't like to risk a rim-fire goin' off in a center-fire gun if I was out a gunnin' for somebody, and I'll nearly bet four bits Gus Sandiver wouldn't, either."

"But what's the difference?" Hall insisted, plainly honest in his perplexity over this technical nicety in ammunition.

Jim looked at him with his big eyebrows drawn threateningly, his face a fighting red above the snowfield of his big white shirt.

"Are you ignorant, or just a darn fool?" he asked. "Center-fire ca'tridges's got a cap in the end—look a-here."

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 "Is that so?" said Hall, reaching for the rest of the shells.

"Yes, that's so," tartly, with a scornful look for such a hollow piece of trickery. "You wasn't in no danger, you ain't under no favor to nobody for savin' you from gittin' a forty-four between the eyes! Where's that loaded shell?"

"You can search me," said Hall, making it as a disclaimer, rather than an offer which might have embarrassed him a little if Jim had accepted.

Jim's manner began to soften, the combative stiffness to relax, as he unkinked his eyebrows and pulled in his chin. He snorted as if he had dust in his nose, turning it off into a chuckle, a gleam of humor in his small, hog eyes.

"Well, Doc, I ain't a blamin' you for tryin' to make yourself look little where most men'd bust a hamestring to look big. Most men'd 'a' throwed in a few loaded shells in place of an empty one, to make a full house, but any man that knows a gun from a turnip'd 'a' throwed in the same kind of shells."

"That's funny," said Hall, red to the core, it seemed to him, he was so furiously confused.

Jim had some kind of a remote, dim feeling of sympathy for this painful mortification, but he wasn't quite ready to let the young man off.

"It wouldn't 'a' been a bad joke, neither, if you could 'a' got away with it, Doc. But I don't see why you want to pretend you wasn't in no danger when you was."

"Suppose we let it pass," Hall suggested, making it almost an appeal, looking up suddenly from his confusion over the shells.

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 "Sure," Jim agreed heartily. "I admired your grit when you butted into that feller and h'isted like a ingin hittin' a bull. But I'll be derned if I know yit whuther you're simple, or a plain derned fool."

"You'd just as well stop trying to figure out, Jim. Nobody ever could do it."

"Well, you got 'em, you got 'em when you opened that door and come out with nothin' but a sponge full of something to stand off forty or fifty men. I tell you, Doc, that got 'em! Some of them fellers's sayin' this morning it wasn't nothing but a bluff, but if it was a bluff it was a dang good one."

"Thanks," said Hall, not insensible to the praise. It came in such relief of his late embarrassment that he felt himself soaring a little. He tiptoed and strutted, as if about to take off for a flight over Damascus and view it from the heights of a perfectly complacent egotism.

"But say, Doc, honest now: what was that stuff you had on that sponge?"

"That? That was psychology." Gravely, all his confusion gone, meeting Jim eye to eye.

"Si—whichery?"

"Psychology."

"That must be something new, I never heard of it in my time. Strong, heh?"

"One of the most dangerous things ever discovered."

"What does it do to a feller, Doc?"

"A little of it in either the ear or the eye has been known to make a man as crazy as a bat."

"Well, I'll be jiggered!" said Jim.

Jim was so eager to get back to the hotel and report success on his previously declared intention of getting out

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 of Dr. Hall what he had poured on the sponge, that he appeared abrupt almost to displeasure. He hurried off with an excuse about dinner, repeating over and over the name of the potent thing that went into a man's eye or ear and drove him mad.

Dr. Hall stood a little while, contemplating the empty cartridges in his hand. Presently he opened the closet door and took out Old Doc Ross's gun, slipped the rim-fire cartridge that had brought confusion on him into an empty chamber, tossed the weapon back again, wise in the humiliating discovery that something more than length and diameter is wanting to make pistol cartridges alike.

Foolish of him, he thought. In his great concern to hold himself free of obligation to anybody in Damascus, in case last night's unkown champion should prove to be one of the boys, as Burnett had said, he had only succeeded in giving them another laugh at his expense. For Elizabeth's eyes he had another cartridge, one that matched in every way the others from Gus Sandiver's gun, except for a plug of gray lead in the end. It was the one that had been under Gus Sandiver's hammer when the unknown shooter's bullet stung the old horse-thief in the wrist.

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always was hot mince pie for Sunday dinner on the train. The filling for it came out of buckets similar to the jelly containers, bearing labels picturing the fruits, condiments, meats and liquors which were the traditional components of that barbaric dish. The pictures were only symbolical, designed to provoke the appetite and spice the anticipation, the mixture within the pails containing little of the fruits and delicacies shown there in vivid green and red. It would have been an unwise and profitless exploration for anyone who had eaten or intended to eat the mixture, to inquire too closely into the ingredients of that brown, spiced hash.

What it contained or did not contain caused neither speculation nor disquiet in the minds or stomachs of the jerries. It had a racy nip to it, which might have been vinegar, cider or champagne for all a jerry cared, with plenty of sharp spices to delight their smoke-toughened palates. Each jerry had his wedge of it, cut to a true and impartial form. It was the very first thing laid down on the long table by Mary and Annie when they set the stage for the midday meal.

There was one slight deviation from the weekday program in the Sunday dinner: the girls did not remain in the dining-car after the jerries were seated. Instead of

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 standing by with the coffeepots as on other days, the girls stood them on the floor, one at each end of the table. If any jerry wanted a second cup he must go after it, at the risk of somebody hogging his pie while he was gone. That was the Sunday concession to Annie and Mary, the one little break in the rule of service in the lives of the ladies who lived on wheels.

Mrs. Charles summoned the jerries to their meals by beating a resounding signal on a dishpan from the kitchen door. When she was ready for Dr. Hall, usually about half an hour later, she whooped shrilly, or sent Mary running across, or Annie put her head out of the door, fingers between her teeth, and whistled.

On hearing this latter signal this Sunday noon, Dr. Hall got to his feet with alacrity, newspapers flung around his chair, his speculations and conjectures over the doings of last night brought to an abrupt end. The signal to meals was always welome. It was amazing how hungry a man got in that country west of Dodge.

Annie and Mary were fresh as wild roses in their long white aprons and crimped bangs, for not much is needed to make a young woman attractive when she has a hearty good humor and a clean face. Last night's party, even with its interrupted program, had been a refreshing interlude to them. They were gayer for it; Annie had many a laugh to stop in the door of her big mouth with hastily clapped hand.

They had spoken at breakfast of the trouble at the dance, discussed it briefly, and finished with it. Encounters between men were not a strange sight in their eyes; perils and small heroisms were things common to railroad life. To the women of the boarding-train and the

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 jerries, there was nothing to marvel over in Dr. Hall's close brush the night before. He had done well in putting a stop to the disturbance, better still by patching up the poor savage of the prairies and sending him on his way. That was done like a railroader. There was nothing more to be said.

Mrs. Charles was indignant, rather than amused, over the effort of Jim Justice to unload his unprofitable hotel upon her hands. It required no records nor balance sheets to enlighten her on the state of business in that establishment. Compared to her own busy boarding-house on wheels, it was only a stagnant eddy beside the stream of the passing world.

"The time's comin' when a hotel in Damascus will pay, and pay big, but it's never goin' to do it under the management of any old crawfish like Jim Justice," she said. "I can see the time comin' when I'd like to have a nice white hotel of about twenty rooms in this town, but I can't see that time near enough to buy that man out for four thousand dollars."

"The old rascal!" Hall blurted indignantly. "He told me not a week ago he'd be glad to sell for three thousand."

"Yes, and he'd take two if anybody offered it to him. But I'm not ready right now to start up a hotel on land."

"I wish you was," Annie said wistfully.

"Yes, but in some town, not this flag station away out here in this cussid country!" Mary added, bitter in her scorn of Damascus and its insignificance in the railroad scheme.

"Dodge is overdone on hotels," Mrs. Charles returned, corrective and sarcastic in a breath.

"There's other places besides Dodge," said Mary hotly,

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 redder for Annie's suppressed giggle, part of which would get out between her fingers. "Oh, shut up, or I'll slap you to sleep!" turning fiercely on her sister, who was undisturbed by her threat.

"They say it's all settled to make this a division point and build shops," Hall remarked, as indifferent to Mary's threat against her sister as the others, such outbursts between them being of daily occurrence. "That is, if they keep the county seat here. Otherwise it's going to Simrall, they say. But Simrall hasn't got much of a chance to win the election, according to the poll of voters, Judge Waters was telling me yesterday."

"They always say that about every railroad camp," Mary told him with high scorn. "Some people's ready to believe anything. I pity their ignorance!"

Hall was too well accustomed to the honest method of railroad expression by this time to be embarrassed by Mary's sniffing comment on his weakness. He helped himself to mashed potatoes without flush or tremor, only giving Annie a wink of understanding, as much as to say that, between them, it was appreciated as a joke. Mrs. Charles was cutting a slice of beef. She did not take her eyes from the operation to correct her outspoken daughter by as much as a frown.

"It's funny," Mrs. Charles commented, "how it gets out on a person if they've got a little money. I've got five thousand dollars—I guess everybody might as well know it now—in a savin's bank in Denver, but how Jim Justice ever got wind of it I don't know. Charley Burnett's found it out, too. Well, I don't mind about Charley; he's a—what do you think about that cattle company of his he's organized, Dr. Hall?"

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 "Does he want you to put your money in it?" Dr. Hall counter-queried.

"Yes," Mrs. Charles admitted, nodding several times, impressed by what she appeared to believe the doctor's shrewdness in the case. "Charley was down here bright and early this morning wantin' me to take some stock in his company. Everybody in town's gone in with him, he says. But I don't know. I wanted to ask you."

"I'm afraid Burnett is promising more than he can deliver," Hall replied, shaking his head gravely.

"He's made a lot of money speculatin' in cattle the last year or two, though," Mrs. Charles said.

"You can't go very strong on public report. Does he show any figures on his present condition?"

"A lot of cattlemen around here have gone in with him," she replied. "I guess they wouldn't risk their money in something that wasn't sound. Charley says cattle are bound to go away up on account of 'em cuttin' the range up in Texas for farmin'. He says he'll guarantee two dollars for every one a person puts in his company by next December."

While Mrs. Charles seemed merely to be repeating Burnett's assurances to her, she was in fact arguing for his scheme, in the way that a proselyte to some belief which he has not investigated and does not understand, argues with specious shallowness, more to confirm himself in his new convictions than in the expectation of convincing another. Hall was reluctant to advise her bluntly against putting a dollar into Burnett's company. He could not denounce the business, knowing nothing about Burnett's resources, although he questioned his intention and business probity.

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 "Don't you think Charley's honest?" Mrs. Charles asked him pointedly.

"Honest men lose their heads in business schemes sometimes, and get in deeper than they can wade," he replied. "He might be able to turn two dollars for one on his investment by next fall, but it sounds a little wild to meme. [sic]"

"What do you know about it? How many cattle did you ever raise?" Mary challenged in quick-fire questioning, taking no trouble to conceal her low opinion of him as a financial adviser.

"I've raised more beef right here at this table than I ever did before in my life," Hall replied, with no great success at railroad humor.

"Some people couldn't even raise hell with a spoon!" said Mary, her repartee more to the point, it appeared. It got a laugh out of Annie, which it took one hand clapped on the other to hold in, along with the first bite of mince pie which she had enveloped only a moment before.

"Would you put any money in the company yourself, Dr. Hall?" Mrs. Charles asked.

"Since you come at me that way, no. No; I wouldn't put a dollar into any scheme Burnett stood back of, if I had a barrel of it."

"I told Charley I'd have to think it over and ask some advice about it. If you don't think—"

"I wish to God somebody'd come along that's got brains enough to advise you, then!" Mary interposed. "What's it to some people if we never get out of this greasy, crummy old train! It's all right to somebody that don't have to slave and slop around here day in and year in for board and clothes. Clothes! Huh! I ain't

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Page:Manual of the New Zealand Flora.djvu/520

480 C. novæ-zealandiæ, T. Kirk in Trans. N.Z. Inst. xx. (1889) 183 (name only).—After a careful examination of the type specimens in Mr. Kirk's herbarium, I have no hesitation in referring this to the northern C. epithymum, Linn., which has been observed in many localities in the colony, and which often associates itself with the indigenous vegetation.

Herbs or shrubs, rarely small trees. Leaves alternate, often in unequally placed pairs, but never truly opposite, entire or lobed or pinnate: stipules wanting. Flowers regular or occasionally slightly irregular, hermaphrodite, solitary or cymose; bracts wanting. Calyx inferior, persistent, 4–5-toothed or -lobed. Corolla gamopetalous, nypogynous, 4–5-toothed or -lobed. campanulate or funnel-shaped or rotate, often plicate. Stamens 4–5, inserted on the tube of the corolla and alternate with its lobes; anthers free or conniving, dehiscing lengthwise or by apical pores. Ovary superior, 2-celled, rarely incompletely 4-celled; style terminal, simple; stigma entire or 2-lobed; ovules numerous, amphitropous, on prominent peltate placentas attached to the middle of the septum. Fruit a berry or capsule, usually 2-celled. many-seeded. Seeds small, compressed or reuiform; albumen copious; embryo terete, curved or almost spiral, radicle next the hilum.

Herbs or shrubs or small trees, unarmed or spinous. Leaves alternate, often in pairs, a smaller one being developed in the axil of the larger one, entire or irregularly toothed or divided. Flowers solitary or more frequently in short racemes or cymes, lateral or terminal. Calyx 5–10-lobed or -partite. Corolla rotate or shortly campanulate; tube short; limb 5–10-lobed, plaited. Stamens 5, inserted on the throat of the corolla, exserted; filaments short; anthers oblong or linear, erect and connivent into a cone around the style, opening by 2 terminal pores. Ovary 2-celled, rarely 3–4-celled; style simple; stigma small; ovules numerous. Fruit a small or large 2-celled many-seeded berry. Seeds numerous, discoid or reniform.


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 got clothes enough to flag a handcar, and me waitin' table for a gang of tarriers as long as I can remember."

"You might be worse off," Mrs. Charles chided her, but kindly, feeling perhaps that her bitterness was not altogether unjustified.

"You might be on the bum, kid," said Annie, soberly. "It ain't so worse feedin' jerries. I'd rather do it than slave in somebody's kitchen in the city."

"Wise girl, Annie!" Dr. Hall commended her, patting her shoulder with patriarchal caress.

"I know what I'd say to Charley Burnett if he wanted me to put money in his cattle company," Annie continued. "I'd tell him to go straight up."

"I ain't put any money in it yet, Annie," Mrs. Charles reminded her.

"Don't, then," said the genial Annie, shortly.

"Old rags and old shucks, over in the corner!" Mary derided her. "Workin' your arms off on this darned old train, marryin' some snoot of a jerry and livin' in a shack by the side of the track. I'd rather marry one of these grays on a farm."

"Everything looks better than the business you're in," Mrs. Charles sighed, knowing from long experience the uselessness of argument against Mary when she had a spell on like that. Mary was the discord of the kitchen, the rebel of the train. Everybody else was either satisfied with things as they were, or accepted them cheerfully in the hope of doing better in time. Only Mary chafed her heart sore; only Mary, of the three, was ashamed of her lot. To-day she was sharper than usual, careless of who heard her or of whom she hurt.

Dr. Hall was called from the table before he had finished

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 his pie, on the frantic summons of Little Jack Ryan, whose prodigious wife had broken her neck, he said, in a fall down the kitchen steps.

The fact proved to be less serious than the report, the break being no nearer the lady's neck than her collar bone. She was making a great moan and commotion over the misfortune, apparently having inherited none of the Indian fortitude. Jack wanted the doctor to give her "a drap o' clariform," which being denied, he suggested whisky as a succedaneum. While the doctor did not prohibit it, knowing the interdiction would hold no longer than he was out of the door, he said she would be better off without it. Jack said if the doctor had no objection he would take a little snort himself, then, to assist him in bearing the sight of his poor dear's suffering.

Jack's next greatest concern was whether the accident could be listed as a railroad casualty, and himself relieved of doctor's charges through that arrangement. Dr. Hall was afraid it could not be done, but Jack could rest easy about the bill. There would not be any.

"It's a relafe," said Jack, "it's noble and grand of you, dochter, dear. I've been invistin' me capital. I've gone in the cattle business along of Charley Burnett."

"The devil you have!" Hall said, nothing complimentary for either investor or promoter in his surprised exclamation.

"It's a fine business he has, Charley Burnett, and a smart felly he is, too, with his pocket full of diamints. He'll turn every dollar I've put in with him into two before Christmas, as aisy as I'd clane a lamp. It's nothing to him to make money; he was born with the gift."

"He was born with some kind of a gift," Hall agreed.

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 "How much did he get—how much did you put in the pot?"

"Twelve hoondred," said Jack, easily, with an air of largeness, as if the sum amounted to so little in his expansive affairs. "It'll come back to me twinty-foive."

Hall considered it wiser to withhold comment. The affair was no business of his; expression of his doubts on this quickly promised turn of money would only set Ryan's anxiety working several months ahead of time. . It would do for the simple fellow to sweat over his investment when dividend time arrived. Then it might turn out better than he expected. He had no warrant, based alone on his personal dislike of Burnett, to go around knocking his easy money scheme.

Hall finished bandaging Mrs. Ryan's shoulder, saying no more, regretful, indeed, of what he had said already in the way of advice that day. But he hoped fervently that Mrs. Charles would let her money rest in the savings bank, hard-won as it was, slow as it must have been in growing to that comfortable sum. It was a golden bait in Burnett's eye, and he would not let it swing out of his grab if glib words and side-plugging with the ambitious Mary could accomplish his purpose. The fellow was altogether too eager, it appeared to Hall, to pull his neighbors into his sure thing, for a strictly honest business man.

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was no organization, aggregation or collection by any name, in the country west of Dodge, as notable as Burnett's Cowboy Band. This band, numbering twenty-five or thirty, had been assembled by Burnett about a year before Dr. Hall's arrival in Damascus, as an expression of his importance which his own tongue and presence seemed insufficient to convey to the public appreciation. The most notable feature of the collection was the total absence of cowboys from the cast.

The leader of the band was the hardware merchant, a small Englishman with a brown-gray beard, whose name was Peters. He blew into a cornet with such spirit as to split the notes sometimes, making them high where they should have been low, but aside from that small fault of technique he was a most admirable musician, a sober man, with a family. He could go right ahead with his tune, afoot or ahorse, making the rest of them blow hard to keep up, and if he finished ahead of them, which he did frequently, it was nobody's business but his own.

That was one of the admirable things about the cowboy band: every fellow in it was so high-minded and independent that each of them pounded and puffed along according to his own gait. Off quite a distance, as one must stand to get the subject of a modern painting, one could identify a tune, or a fragment of a tune, now and

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 then when the band was at practice of an evening in the Woodmen's Hall.

Dine Fergus was the tuba, Larrimore one of the trombones, others of equal consequence filling out the band. Burnett supplied the instruments and cowboy regalia, Peters giving his services as instructor and leader for the honor of the town. The first public appearance of the band away from home had been made at the livestock convention in Wichita the autumn past. Burnett had provided a special car for the trip, with large advertisements of its contents along the sides.

This Sunday afternoon the band was out, expanding its bellows in the public square. There was a stream of music coming down Custer Street that seemed as if the dam had burst as Dr. Hall waded against it on his way to Major Cottrell's sod house, to learn how his patient fared. Hall thought of the noise as a flood, the impetu' osity of it whirling and mixing things as it spread. It was as if orderly music had been turned out to go its way, losing its head in the exuberance of freedom.

The band had on its red neckerchiefs, sombreros, fringed pants, and all the other regulation adornments of romance cowboys, many of them being articles which the slow headed smallwits who rode at the tails of cattle never wore, either at work or at play. Peters, a short man, stood on a box at the head of his double line formation, the base drum at the bottom end. They were just finishing a tune when Hall arrived at the square. He stopped on the edge of the crowd to see how they went about the business of mauling a tune so mercilessly, that being his first sight of the assembly as a whole.

Peters emptied his instrument genteelly, his example

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 followed by all who had metal contrivances which induced condensation. Probably something more than breath got into some of them. It was very likely, indeed. There was a great deal of unscrewing, jiggling of keys, upending, tapping. When all was clear, and everybody set, Peters put his cornet to his lips, parted his mustache with the mouthpiece, this way and that, delicately pursing his lips, showing the red of them under his beard.

Peters set the instrument to his mouth, took it away, looking around with questioning eye. There was a general bracing of feet, a spreading of legs, a settling down firmly for the struggle among the members of the band. Peters put the cornet to his mouth again, and took it away dry and unblown; pursed his lips once more with a tentative inflation, his eyes enlarging under the pressure.

"R-r-raidy!" said Peters, with a warning, portentous sound, the instrument approaching his lips. It was only two inches away from the place when he checked it, inflating his cheeks again in that tentative, testing way.

All was expectation; nobody breathed, the bandmen's chests big with the stored vigor waiting the word to go. Peters gave the bugle end of his cornet a little flip, like the tail of a fowl taking to the air.

"R-r-raidy!" he warned again. "Pla-a-ay!"

To an outsider it did not appear that they made a very good start. In fact, it sounded to Hall as if somebody had jumped the gun. It did not take those whose toe-holds had slipped at the signal long to overtake their competitors, even to forge ahead. Notable among these was the base-drummer, who gained speed as he advanced. He made an amazing recovery.

This drummer was a young man known about town as

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 Frog Lewis, a tall, earnest chap with a long, thin face, and a gulping look about his mouth and throat from which his nickname had come. He finished the tune with a look of great satisfaction, plainly believing himself the winner, in which opinion Dr. Hall enthusiastically concurred. If he hadn't struck a fence or something, he would have been half a mile in the lead if the tune had continued three minutes longer.

The band was warming up to its work in fine style, although in the next piece Frog Lewis appeared to have lost step. He lagged, he labored, he laid on in the wrong place, out of all time or reason apparent to anybody but himself. Dr. Hall retreated, having got an earful that would last him a month. As he turned up the road toward Cottrell's, the piece came to an end, Frog Lewis giving a prodigious single and a quick double beat to close it, in his accustomed triumphant style. It seemed as if he had been lagging on purpose this time for his happy finale, which gave the impression that he had driven the tune into the barn and slammed the door.

Major Cottrell was sitting by the open window, listening to the distant band, Mrs. Cottrell near at hand reading a Leavenworth paper which featured army news. Elizabeth had gone for a ride. The house was insufficient without her. It seemed an old place to-day, dreary in spite of the blue eagerness of the spring afternoon.

Major Cottrell said he was gaining every day. That was due to home-cured dried beef, he declared, which he placed second only to the skill of Dr. Hall. But that skill had been expended in the beginning; science had done all it could do in the first few days. Now it was the turn of dried beef, which the major kept by him at all

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 times, cut in convenient strips for gentlemanly mastication.

They had heard in the sod house of Dr. Hall's adventure with Gus Sandiver the night before. He had taken the proper course, all through, Major Cottrell said.

"As a public official and the chief sponser of this town, I thank you," Major Cottrell said, offering his hand. "We don't want any lynchings in Damascus, nor any rioting of that kind to get us into the papers. On his own account Gus Sandiver wasn't worth the risk you took to save his neck—I'd shoot him as quick as I could pull my gun if I met him in the road—but you did more than save the life of a worthless man. You saved the honor of this town, and every good citizen in it thanks you. You've made friends by it that you'll never lose."

"I've been paid more than I earned then," Hall returned, uncomfortable under the old gentleman's high rating for his rash behavior in an affair that might have had a different ending only for that friendly shot out of the dark.

Did they know? he wondered. There was nothing apparent in their faces, nothing suggested in their unreserved manner. Elizabeth would not be the one to talk. But she would talk to him; he was resolved on that. Elizabeth would talk to him, compelled by his gratitude.

Major Cottrell was not a man to press acknowledgments to the cheapening point. He dropped the subject of Gus Sandiver and the honor of Damascus, turning to railroad news. From there it was a natural step for Hall to the affairs of Charley Burnett, upon whose new company he was curious to have the major's expression.

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 Hall told of Burnett's endeavor to draw Mrs. Charles into his scheme, of Little Jack Ryan's investment, and what he had heard of the town in general jumping to the new company like freezing people crowding around a fire.

"Yes, everybody's handing Charley their money," Cottrell said, laughing over Hall's comparison. "Maybe they'll be left out in the cold, instead of gettin' their fingers warm in Charley's financial blaze. He was up to see me last night. Oh well, I might as well own up I put a little in his game. Not enough to make me if he wins, nor break me if he loses. I never put all of my pile on any one card in my life, Charley's a puzzle; he's one of these financial sports that bursts out of nowhere and sets the world afire. He's sensational, but I believe he's sound. Did you think of throwin' in with him?"

"No," Hall replied, decisively.

Major Cottrell chuckled, growing grave and sober in a moment, nodding understandingly.

"I can see where Charley would look somewhat risky to a stranger. Easy enough, with his four-flusher front and handful of diamonds. But we know Charley pretty well here—that is, we know him as well as anybody, I guess. We've seen him grow from nothing to two million dollars' worth of cattle in the past four years. When a man does that, with you looking on all the time, it kind of makes you want to get in on it with him when the chance comes along."

"Naturally," Hall said. The man's personality is disagreeable to me. He appears to me just what you've called him—a four-flusher. I'm sorry Jack Ryan's wife didn't break her collar-bone yesterday."

"Yes, it would have been better if he'd kept out of it.

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 I hope that railroad woman keeps clear. Nobody can afford to gamble, except on his surplus. This advice about puttin' all your eggs in one basket might do for a person that's only got one egg. I say if you've got two, put 'em in separate baskets, and see that the baskets are a good ways apart."

"Pretty sound finance, it seems to me," Hall agreed.

"Although I believe Charley's going to come out big," Cottrell said, somewhat hastily, as if to head off any impression to the contrary that might get abroad as having come from him. "He's got unlimited credit in the big Kansas City banks, they're fairly asking him to take their money. It's assurance enough for me when a business has the endorsement of a set of men as shrewd as those Kansas City bankers. I'd put some of them against the sharpest minds of Wall Street, any day."

"One of them told me once that the test of a banker's shrewdness was keeping clear of Wall Street," Hall recalled. "But I haven't seen him in a long time; I don't know whether they've got him yet."

"One mistake Burnett's making is that blame fool band," Cottrell declared with no compromising decisiveness. "It's a disgrace to this town to go haulin' that outfit around the country."

"They may improve," Hall said hopefully. "They appear to have a lot of individual confidence, if not any great amount of cohesion."

"They're as contrary as a crowd of old women when they begin to hammer on a tune. Well, I've got a reply from the state board in this matter of Old Doc Ross. The old rascal is a regular graduate of medicine, registered and solid as a rock. I'd have gambled the other way."

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 "I'm rather glad to hear of it," Hall said, speaking quite honestly, more honestly than he could have spoken, perhaps, if there had been any element of competition involved.

"Yes, I believe I am, too, to tell the truth about it," Cottrell confessed, laughing over it. "When the heat of vexation with the old scoundrel passes I always feel kind of sorry for him, for it's as these people say here: there's a spark of something good in the old scamp, either a native shrewdness or a professional competency, that leads him right eight times out of ten."

"I saw him as I came up," Hall said, "sober as a lark, shaved and clipped and dressed up respectably. I had to look twice to convince my eyes."

"He lifts his heels like he's skatin' when he's sober and got on a clean white shirt," Major Cottrell said.

"He's a disgusting old villain!" Mrs. Cottrell fired from the flank. "It's a disgrace to the state that he's allowed to practice."

"Now you hear it," Major Cottrell said, nodding to Hall gravely, but with a laugh in his eyes.

"I'm surprised to hear you half-way condoning his disgusting vices," she fired again.

Major Cottrell winked at Hall, with sly understanding, as if to say most of his excusing of Old Doc Ross had been done to provoke her, just to show the visitor what kind of metal was in that family.

"I look for him to take fire one of these nights when he goes to blow out his lamp," he said cheerfully. "Then we'll get some nice portly old gentleman to take his place."

"Portly old gentlemen are out of fashion as physicians,"

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 she corrected him, this time the laugh on her side of the field. "We require brains in our doctors instead of—"

"Belly," said Major Cottrell, filling out the hesitant pause.

"Major Cottrell!" she reproved him, blushing to the tips of her ears.

"You don't have to observe those old-maidish niceties when you discuss anatomy before a doctor," Major Cottrell assured her with off-hand ease, pleased to the ribs to see the flash of virtuous delicacy in his wife's face. "Maybe we can induce Doctor Hall to take the old man's place when he blows up. He could do worse—he could do miles worse—than throw in with us here and grow up with the town."

"It would be a hard life, but a full one," she said, looking at Dr. Hall with appeal more pressing than any her tongue could speak. "A doctor in a pioneer place is a missionary."

"Pioneer place!" Major Cottrell discounted the designation for Damascus. "We did the pioneering here twenty years ago. There's nothing to do in this country now but pick up the profits of our hardships."

"There'll be hardship and suffering among these poor people who are crowding in here expecting to farm," she said in prophetic sadness. "I see them drive past going out to their claims, all they possess in one wagon, and not overloaded at that. They're unprepared, they don't realize what's ahead of them."

"There's not much profit for a doctor in them," Major Cottrell said, with the cattleman's hardness for those who had come to displace him of his ancient rights.

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 "There's the profit of merciful deeds," she returned, correctively.

"A doctor can't live on that in this country," Major Cottrell said gently. "What do you think of the prospect, Doctor?"

"I haven't got down to thinking much about it."

"There'll be telephones strung all over this country in time, like they're getting them in the cities, though I don't suppose a doctor could bring a child into the world by telephone."

"Major Cottrell!"

"Nor operate on a man for this new disease you doctors have invented, this new affix, or suffix—or what is it you call it?"

"Appendicitis, I expect you mean, Major."

"That's the word. It's got an ominous sound."

"Have you had any more calls to the country, Doctor?" Mrs. Cottrell inquired anxiously.

"No, I'm happy to say. They seem to be pretty healthy out there on the prairie."

"They doctor themselves till they're in the last extremity," Major Cottrell said. "I've been among that kind—Missourians, and those people. Every family's got a bottle of salts and calomel, take 'em like sugar. So, you haven't been considering staying with us, Doctor?"

"Not to say seriously."

"It's a great opportunity, a splendid chance."

"I have been told so, Major."

"You don't want to follow a railroad camp all your days, even if you could. You'll have to settle down one of these days and build up a permanent practice. Why not here in Damascus?"

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 "I don't believe there's any particular reason I could argue against it," Hall admitted.

"Then think it over, will you, Hall? You could buy Ross out for a little of nothing, and you don't need to let the money stop you if that would be in the way."

"Thank you, Major Cottrell, sincerely. I will think about it seriously."

Elizabeth was approaching; Hall could see her from his place near the window, sight more interesting in his eyes, perhaps, than it would have been to the others if they had been situated where they could have seen. He wanted to make it appear, to Elizabeth, like a casual meeting at the gap in the sagging wire fence, which they spoke of at the sod house as the gate.

Major Cottrell shook hands again as Hall rose to leave, with a word about dried beef and appendicitis, advancing the sudden conclusion that men would not be cursed by that ailment if they confined their diet in times of trouble to the strengthening provender of plainsmen-soldiers and pioneers.

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seemed always to have an air of wistfulness about her when her features were in repose, as if she nursed a secret sorrow. But it was nothing but one of the tricks nature plays with the feminine face for the allurement of men. There was nothing brooding nor melancholy about Elizabeth at heart. Laughter lay close to the surface; it woke in her eyes with even the stealthiest breath of mirth. Not the vacuous loud laughter such as exploded out of the mouths of Annie and Mary Charles, but the refinement of sympathetic merriment, when her expressive eyes sparkled through small slits of closedrawn lids, seeming to say: "I am laughing with you, not at you, my jolly friend."

Elizabeth laughed that way when she told Dr. Hall of standing back in the shadows, watching him waltz with Mrs. Charles.

"It was duty, not pleasure, a social obligation that had to be discharged," he protested, embarrassed in spite of her friendly appreciation.

"Of course," she said. "I wished there were a Mr. Charles to invite me out. It wasn't half as rough as I expected it to be. Railroad manners certainly are improving."

They were at the gateless gap in the wire fence, from which the posts on either hand leaned away as if to ac-

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 commodate people wide at the waistline, a style not current in Damascus in those hard-riding days. Elizabeth's horse was snipping around with free rein, forelegs spread to bring its nose down to the short grass.

"Yes, everything was going fine until the delegate from Simrall arrived," Hall said, ashamed of his part in the subsequent activities, looking down at his toes like a bashful boy.

"You oughtn't take such risks," she reproved him.

"I thought he'd shot the station agent, but I don't suppose it would have mattered. He seems to be an unpopular sort of man. The old fool was slinging his gun around kind of recklessly—he might have hit some of the women. But you know how it was."

"I've heard several versions and variations. I wasn't there when it happened; Gus put in his appearance after I'd left."

"Somebody shot him through the arm," he said, with such weakness of effect as to sound almost foolish in his ears.

"But you took a long risk when you walked out with that sponge in your hand," she told him, looking at him gravely, shaking her head with solemn disapprobation. "It was a fine bluff, but suppose it hadn't worked?"

"Providence, or some power, appears to raise up friends and protectors for me when they're most needed. I suppose somebody would have stepped up and piloted me out of the scrape, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth shook her head again, not touched by the deep note of gratitude in his voice, unmoved by his meaning glance. She did not change color; there was no embarrassment in her steady, frank eyes, such as one might

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 show when trying to cover a service for which she desired no acknowledgment.

"It was a fine shot, just a snap at the fellow's arm as he swung it up in the lantern light. There isn't one in a thousand could have hit him."

"I don't know anybody in town that could have done it," she seemed to speculate, a puzzled look in her face as she turned all the probabilities in her mind.

"Burnett says he knows who did it," he said, lightly scoffing.

"Maybe he does."

"So does Jim Justice, but their stories don't match."

"What does Charley say?" she looked up quickly, eagerness in her words.

"He says it was one of the boys."

"Maybe it was one of his men from the range," she said thoughtfully. "And windy old Jim says he did it himself?"

"No. He says it was a lady." A knowing glance went with the words, which seemed only to provoke her mystification.

"A lady? Who was she—did he say?"

"The same one I've been hoping it was." There was the vibration of hopeful eagerness in his voice, an appeal. "But she is so modest, she makes so little of her great and timely help to a foolish, impetuous greenhorn, that he's afraid to come right out and thank her the way he wants to."

"Meaning me?" she asked, truly amazed, touching her wishbone with a pointing finger.

"Wasn't it you, Elizabeth?" he almost pleaded, catching the hand with pointing finger that still rested against

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 her bosom in its astonished question of identity. "I'd rather owe it to you than anybody in the world, Elizabeth. Wasn't it you?"

She shook her head, her wistful face pale, her friendly eyes stretched wide.

"It wouldn't have been his arm if'd taken a shot at Gus Sandiver," she replied. She placed her hand impetuously over the one that clasped her own, as if to comfort him for the illusion he had held. "No, no, Doctor Hall; I wasn't there, I didn't even hear the shooting."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"So am I."

"I told Justice you were not there, but he was positive. I've been swelling around all day in the belief I was debtor to somebody I was proud to owe."

"Maybe it was one of the girls in the boarding-train."

she suggested, the thought appearing to make her cold. She drew her hands away.

"They couldn't shoot with anything but a chunk of coal," he said miserably. "Who the dickens do you suppose it was?"

"There are not so many ladies running around loose in this town," she said, her manner implying they were altogether too numerous, at that.

"Justice is an infernal old liar!" he declared. "I don't believe he knows who fired that shot any more than I do."

"Maybe not," she said, assuming indifference.

"There's only one lady in the world I'd accept such a service of," he declared hotly.

"I don't see how you could help yourself," said she.

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 "I'd feel like a cad if I had to owe it to any other girl. If it wasn't you, Elizabeth, Burnett's right about it."

"I expect he is," she agreed.

"I asked him who it was, but he wouldn't tell me. He said the person who did it wasn't out looking for thanks."

"Let it go at that, then."

"I suppose I'll have to. But I'll feel like a sneak, going around in debt to somebody for my life who figures it's something that might hurt his reputation if it got out on him. That shows how I'm rated in this man's town, and yet there are people who tell me I ought to hang out my shingle here and settle down."

"That don't signify," she said, in her breezy, sure-footed way, her poise entirely recovered. "It's somebody that don't want to get in bad with that bunch of shooters over in Simrall. Pass it up."

"The trouble of it is I'll have to treat everybody in this town with a deference they don't deserve and I don't feel, on the chance of snubbing the real hero of the occasion."

"You'd make by it, maybe, if you would come down off your high horse now and then, call them by their first names and set up the cigars. A doctor's got to be more or less a politician, dad says, and I think he's right."

"Oh, if I wanted to stay here in Damascus and build up a practice I could do even that, I guess, but it's a kind of cheap way of getting where you want to go."

"Don't you want to stay in Damascus?" she asked, glancing at him archly, her words almost coaxing.

"Do you want me to stay?" he returned, boorishly, as he realized next moment.

Elizabeth nodded, not a shade of pink in her face.

"Uh-huh!" she grunted, like a tobacco chewer looking

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 around for a place to spit. "All the permanents want you. Judge Waters says you're the finest surgeon he ever saw."

"Judge Waters is a townsite boomer. Extravagant talk is his line of trade."

It pleased him to hear the judgment of that lean, slow-striding, meditative, old man, none the less. He would have stretched himself to his toes in another moment, catching his leg muscles as they were setting to the act, but for Elizabeth's expectantly provoking grin. She was watching for him to preen himself in his pride, probably with the intention of calling him down.

"Try walking around town with the mortals a while," she suggested. "You might as well get used to our ways, for we're not going to let you leave."

Hall was in no humor for trying out her suggestion as he went back to the town square, heading for his office. He hadn't mounted a high horse, he defended himself to his own conscience. He had been indifferent and aloof because he had not felt himself a part of the town, or ever likely to have any deeper interest in it than now. They had conspired against him from the first, throwing their own guilt at his door, trying to give it all the air of a great piece of public levity. It was about as funny as somebody leaving an unwelcome infant in a fellow-traveler's arms.

He held his deliberative way toward Custer Street, thinking of his situation in that town, an outsider who had come to camp on the edge of it, never intending to mingle in its life and affairs. How the swirl of events, small and local as they were, had laid hold of him like the vicious current in a despicable, brawling, muddy little stream, and rolled him until he came to his feet standing

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 more than waist deep in it, every move appearing to take him farther from the bank.

Burnett had served notice on him to keep hands off; others had invited him to lay hold and carry with them. He never had considered stopping permanently in Damascus until Burnett had come at him with that sneering order. His defiant answer to the diamond-shuffling speculator had committed him, in a way. Should he resign his railroad job and take up the challenge of Burnett and the invitation of the really responsible citizens at the same time? It was something to think about.

Here was Major Cottrell offering money to buy out Old Doc Ross, assistance that he did not need, although the proffer was assuring. These people had confidence in the future of their town, and there was some good sport among them who thought enough of the outside doctor to lift up his gun and put in a shot when it was needed most. Burnett had no inside knowledge of that gunner; Burnett's front was all a bluff.

But it wasn't Elizabeth. That took a lot of the edge off. It would have been a pleasantly romantic situation for him as debtor to Elizabeth. Even with her out of it, he could not believe it was anybody who would pop up some day and slam it in his face. Maybe Judge Waters had slung that timely gun. He liked the thought. But it was not Elizabeth.

Old Doc Ross was sitting in his little shack of an office next door to Pink Fergus' place of many enterprises, his door open to the warm air of late afternoon. There was nothing about his appearance indicative of any great amount of humiliation or anguish over the treatment he had received at the young doctor's hands.

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 Ross was smoking a long stogy, the end of it tilted in jaunty defiance, his feet on his flat-topped desk. His boots were polished, his clothing was in array, his entire appearance that of a person pretty well satisfied with himself and things which touched his orbit. There was no trace of his late dissipation in his face; his hand appeared steady when he reached for his long cigar to flick the ash from it delicately, and restore it with fixed and lofty eye. Not a bad-looking man, Hall thought; not a competitor to be despised anywhere, if he kept himself sober and in trim. The fact that he was a regular doctor, though bent toward quackery, had lifted him considerably.

As Hall passed the door he lifted his hand in a hail, nodded, and saluted his fellow practitioner with a hearty:

"Good evening, Doctor."

Old Doc Ross did not move a whisker, nor deflect his lofty eye one point from an apparently deep study of a picture tacked to the wall before him. This was a chaste advertisement of yeast, a calendar beneath the young lady who stood knee deep in June with an armful of hops.

Hall grinned as he went on, suffering no feeling of being snubbed. Contrarily, he was considerably pleased with himself. That was making a start in the direction Elizabeth had advised.

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lost the county seat election by seven votes. It was the fourth day after election when final results were made known, the farthest off precinct being that long sending in its returns by horseback from the northern county line.

It was a shock to Damascus when the county clerk attested the returns and this disastrous verdict of the county's electors was posted. The degradation of defeat lay doubly on Damascus, for the judges of election there knew that ten votes for Simrall had been cast by traitors in the camp.

A week before election day it became known in Damascus that ten voters of that town had banded together, acting on knowledge of a canvass showing how tight the contest would be, for the purpose of selling their votes to the highest bidder.

Damascus fairly laughed itself hoarse when this gang of speculators announced through an advertisement in the Damascus Press their patriotic intention and made known the channel of approach. That being such a seat of high and refined humor, nobody in Damascus thought of the advertisement as anything but a joke, a sly piece of ridicule aimed at Simrall's forlorn chance. It was thought nothing more than a sharp editorial jibe.

The day before election it became apparent that it was

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 not altogether a joke. Somebody was out for the money, and Ora Simrall, it was said, had taken a shot at the chance of being thrown down after the price was paid. Now it was certain there had been honor enough among the traitors to impel them to deliver what they had sold. Ten votes for Simrall were cast, duly counted and credited by the judges of election.

It was ground for contest which Damascus was not slow to begin. The county attorney was on his way to Topeka before the result of the election was announced publicly, to demand the proper writ from the supreme court to stay the hands of Simrall until the fraud of the election could be established in court.

Major Bill Cottrell had been able to go to the polls, but there his services to the county in this crisis had ended. He was scornfully impatient with himself for his slow recovery of strength after his wound had healed. In spite of large quantities of dried beef he remained as weak as a snail, pale and tottering, his hand palsied. Elizabeth had taken his place in the court house where, assisted by two other young women, she had carried on the work of county recorder and treasurer, no light job with this inrush of homesteaders and buyers of railroad land.

Cottrell was roused to fighting fervor by the news of his town's defeat through the treason of its own citizenry. He was for hunting out the scoundrels and shooting them where found, a proceeding which had the endorsement of other substantial citizens. He proposed rounding up all suspects, searching them, and dealing with them on the evidence found in their pockets.

But it was plain that such proceeding had its risks.

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