trike back now and then?"

"Strike back at the woman I love? I'm not quite down to that, I hope,
even if I was once too cowardly to strike for her."

"Always _that!_ Why won't you let me forget?"

"Because you must not forget. Listen: two weeks ago--only two weeks
ago--one of the Angels--er--peacemakers stood up in his place and shot
at me. What I did made me understand that I had gained nothing in a
year."

"Shot at you?" she echoed, and now he might have discovered a note of
real concern in her tone if his ear had been attuned to hear it. "Tell
me about it. Who was it? and why did he shoot at you?"

His answer seemed to be indirection itself.

"How long do you expect to stay in Angels and its vicinity?" he asked.

"I don't know. This is partly a pleasure trip for us younger folk.
Father was coming out alone, and I--that is, mamma decided to come and
make a car-party of it. We may stay two or three weeks, if the others
wish it. But you haven't answered me. I want to know who the man was,
and why he shot at you."

"Exactly; and you have answered yourself. If you stay two weeks, or two
days, in Angels you will doubtless hear all you care to about my
troubles. When the town isn't talking about what it is going to do to
me, it is gossiping about the dramatic arrest of my would-be assassin."

"You are most provoking!" she declared. "Did you make the arrest?"

"Don't shame me needlessly; of course I didn't. One of our locomotive
engineers, a man whom I had discharged for drunkenness, was the hero. It
was a most daring thing. The desperado is known in the Red Desert as
'The Killer,' and he has had the entire region terrorized so completely
that the town marshal of Angels, a man who has never before shirked his
duty, refused to serve the warrant. Judson, the engineer, made the
capture--took the 'terror' from his place in a gambling-den, disarmed
him, and brought him in. Judson himself was unarmed, and he did the
trick with a little steel wrench such as engineers use about a
locomotive."

Miss Brewster, being Colorado-born, was deeply interested.

"Now you are no longer dull, Howard!" she exclaimed. "Tell me in words
just how Mr. Judson did it."

"It was an old dodge, so old that it seemed new to everybody. As I told
you, Judson was discharged for drunkenness. All Angels knows him for a
fighter to the finish when he is sober, and for the biggest fool and the
most harmless one when he is in liquor. He took advanta