e heathen when I took that scalp. There's
one bias-eyed fan-tanner that won't pull his freight for Chiny as soon
as he gets his pockets full of good American money. I reckon I was a
public benefactor when I sheared that washee-washee, and I deserve the
pig tail as a decoration for my services. No, sir, the scalp's mine,
by every count you can mention, and you'll have to give it up."

"Is the queue all you want?"

"If that's all you've got that belongs to me."

"Well, then, take it, and stop your jackassing about the fool thing,"
said Gillam, holding out the queue.

"The hell you say!" Nick exclaimed, quite taken aback and much
disappointed.

"Yes, here it is. And I call these gentlemen to witness that I offer
it to you freely and without any conditions."

So Nick reluctantly took the braid and gave up his case against
Gillam. "It was just like the blamed whelp," he complained to Judge
Harlin, "to back down and spoil all the fun, but it's no more than you
might expect from a man that wears a stove-pipe." Harry Gillam was the
only man in Las Plumas who wished, or dared to wear a silk hat, and
his taste in the matter of headgear gave constant edge to Ellhorn's
feeling of contempt and aversion. "I'm blamed sorry for it," Nick went
on, "for I sure reckon half the kids in town would have been shyin'
rocks at that plug before the trial was over."

"I guess he was buffaloed," he said later, as he finished giving an
account of the affair to Emerson Mead. "It was the meanest sort of a
backdown you ever saw, but it just showed the fellow's gait. A man
with no more grit than that had better go back east, where he can
wear a stove-pipe hat without lookin' like a fool, which he sure is."

"What made you so determined to have the thing, Nick?" Mead asked,
examining the braid.

Nick gave a twist to the ends of his mustache and looked
contemplatively at the ceiling. "Well," he said slowly, and there were
signs of the Irish roll in his voice, "it was my scalp. I took it,
first, and then I was after payin' for it. Sure and I wanted it,
Emerson, to remind me not to mix my drinks again. It's my pledge to
take whisky straight and beer the next day. And I sure reckon whenever
I look at it I'll say to myself, 'Nick, you've been a blooming,
blasted, balky, blithering, bildaverous idiot once too often. Don't
you do it again.'"

Notwithstanding his feeling about it, Ellhorn went away and forgot the
earnest of his future good behavior