n, the thought of this white-haired man
in the hands of the executioner. He was thinking of the kindly heart
beating within that stalwart bosom. He was thinking of the wonderful,
thoughtful kindness for others which was always the motive of his
life. And a deep-throated curse rose to his lips. But it found no
utterance. It could not in that presence.

"An' my mind's made up," he jerked out at last, with concentrated
force. Then he added with an abrupt softening, "Let's eat, Padre. I
was forgettin'. Mebbe you're hungry some."

CHAPTER XXXI

THE JOY OF BEASLEY

An unusual number of horses were tethered at the posts outside
Beasley's saloon, and, a still more unusual thing, their owners, for
the most part, were not in their usual places within the building.
Most of them were lounging on the veranda in various attitudes best
calculated to rest them from the effects of the overpowering heat of
the day. Beasley was lounging with them. For once he seemed to have
weakened in his restless energy, or found something of greater
interest than that of netting questionable gains.

The latter seemed to be the more likely, for his restless eyes
displayed no lack of mental activity. At any rate, he displayed an
attitude that afternoon which startled even his bartender. Not once,
but several times that individual, of pessimistic mood, had been
called upon to dispense free rations of the worst possible liquor in
the place, until, driven from wonder to protest, he declared, with
emphatic conviction and an adequate flow of blasphemy, addressing
himself to the bottles under the counter, the smeary glasses he
breathed upon while wiping with a soiled and odoriferous cloth, that
the boss was "bug--plumb bug." Nevertheless, his own understanding of
"crookedness" warned him that the man had method, and he was anxious
to discover the direction in which it was moving. Therefore he
watched Beasley's doings with appreciative eyes, and his interest grew
as the afternoon waned.

"He's on a crook lay," he told himself after a while. And the thought
brightened his outlook upon life, and helped to banish some of his
pessimism.

The chief feature of interest for him lay in the fact that the men
foregathered were a collection of those who belonged to the
"something-for-nothing" class, as he graphically described them. And
he observed, too, that Beasley was carefully shepherding them. There
were a few of the older hands of the camp, but the