is of course impossible.

Meantime Boone stood quietly by the camp-fire, entirely in the open,
coolly potting the enemy as regularly and surely as a master wing-shot
thinning a flight of ducks. Three times they so charged and Boone so
received them, pouring into them a steady, deadly fire out of his
Winchester and two pistols. And when, after the third charge, the war
party drew off for good, forty-odd ponies and twenty-odd warriors lay
upon the plain, stark evidence of Boone's wonderful nerve and
marksmanship. Shortly after the fight one of his mates told me that
while he and three others were doing their best, there was no doubt
that nearly all the dead fell before Boone's fire.

A type diametrically opposite to that of the debonair Boone May was
Captain Jim Smith, one of the best peaceofficers the frontier ever
knew. Of Captain Smith's early history nothing was known, except that
he had served with great credit as a captain of artillery in the Union
Army. He first appeared on the U. P. during construction days in the
late sixties. Serving in various capacities as railroad detective,
marshal, stock inspector, and the like, for eighteen years Captain
Smith wrote more red history with his pistol (barring May's work on the
Sioux) than any two men of his time.

The last I knew of him he had enough dead outlaws to his
credit--thirty-odd--to start, if not a respectable, at least, a
fair-sized graveyard. Captain Jim's mere look was almost enough to
still the heart-beat and paralyze the pistol hand of any but the
wildest of them all. His great burning black eyes, glowering deadly
menace from cavernous sockets of extraordinary depth, were set in a
colossal grim face; his straight, thin-lipped mouth never showed teeth;
his heavy, tight-curling black moustache and stiff black imperial
always had the appearance of holding the under lip closely glued to the
upper. In years of intimacy, I never once saw on his lips the faintest
hint of a smile. He had tremendous breadth of shoulders and depth of
chest; he was big-boned, lean-loined, quick and furtive of movement as
a panther. In short, Captain Jim was altogether the most
fearsome-looking man I ever saw, the very incarnation of a relentless,
inexorable, indomitable, avenging Nemesis.

Like most men lacking humor, Captain Jim was devoid of vices; like all
men lacking sentiment, he cultivated no intimacies. Throughout those
years loved nothing, animate or inanimate,