e agreement with
his pardner when they split. And I've got the agreement! Now what you
got to say?"

"Say? Why its _loco_! Why doesn't the pardner raise a row?"

"He's dead."

"His heirs then?"

"He hasn't got but one heir--his daughter." My heart skipped a beat in
the amazement of a half idea. "And she knew nothing about the agreement.
Nobody knows but old H.H.--and me." He sat back, visibly gloating over
me. But his mood was passing. His earlier exhilaration had died, and
with it was dying the expansiveness of his confidence. The triumph of
his last speech savoured he slipped again into his normal self. He
looked at me suspiciously, and raised his whiskey to cover his
confusion.

"What's it to yuh, anyway?" he muttered into his glass darkly. His eyes
were again shifting here and there; and his lips were snarled back
malevolently to show his teeth.

At this precise moment the lords of chance willed Windy Bill and others
to intrude on our privacy by opening the door and hurling several
whiskey-flavoured sarcasms at the pair of us. The jockey seemed to
explode after the fashion of an over-inflated ball. He squeaked like a
rat, leaped to his feet, hurled the chair on which he had been sitting
crash against the door from which Windy Bill _et al_ had withdrawn
hastily, and ended by producing a small wicked-looking automatic--then a
new and strange weapon--and rushing out into the main saloon. There he
announced that he was known to the cognoscenti as Art the Blood and was
a city gunman in comparison with which these plain, so-called bad men
were as sucking doves to the untamed eagle. Thence he glanced briefly at
their ancestry as far as known; and ended by rushing forth in the
general direction of McCloud's hotel.

"Suffering giraffes!" gasped Windy Bill after the whirlwind had passed.
"Was that the scared little rabbit that wept all them salt tears over at
the depot? What brand of licker did you feed him, Sandy?"

I silently handed him the bottle.

"Soothing syrup--my God!" said Windy in hushed tones.

CHAPTER VIII

At that epoch I prided myself on being a man of resource; and I
proceeded to prove it in a fashion that even now fills me with
satisfaction. I annexed the remainder of that bottle of soothing syrup;
I went to Sol Levi and easily procured delivery of the other five. Then
I strolled peacefully to supper over at McCloud's hotel. Pathological
knowledge of dope fiends was outside my ken--I cou