with a careful carelessness.

"Fireworks? Why, do you know, Frosty, I believe I could do your
fireworks for you all right. I know fireworks pretty well, and I saw
your 'Columbia' at Emerald last year."

"And would you do it, Gilbert?" asked La Rue. "It wouldn't _pay_," added
the tight-fisted old fellow. "It wouldn't pay _you_--a man like _you_;
but--"

"Oh, I just don't want to see the boys disappointed and the show
spoiled," rejoined Gilbert. "I don't want any money."

La Rue was almost ready to embrace the sheriff of Wild Horse County. His
burdens had not been light, even before the despised Jose's defection.
There was a multitude of things, big and little, which could not well be
carried with a show of the sort, but had always to be picked up locally,
at the last moment; and a crude little cow-town like Blowout not only
failed to supply many of these, but stood, as one might say, with
dropped jaw at the very suggestion of them--at the mere mention of their
unfamiliar names.

And so the company--otherwise the La Rue family--had to produce much of
the paraphernalia out of its inner consciousness, which meant that the
old man's temper was continually rasped, that the Signorina's nerves
and her ingenuity were on a strain, and that Minnie was hard at work
from dawn till dark, practising between whiles.

Troy Gilbert had put it most hopefully when he said that he knew
fireworks pretty well--or one might say that the statement was
susceptible of two different interpretations. As a matter of fact, Troy
knew fireworks only from the spectator's side of the question.

He now had Jose Romero moved over into the back room of his place, where
he might mitigate the rigors of that alien's confinement, and at the
same time receive from the Mexican very necessary instruction.

Mercifully, there was an ample supply of fireworks, for the show was to
be repeated at Antelope, over in Lone Jack County, and again at Cinche.

Moreover, drawing heavily, as he had been instructed, upon Kid
Barringer's bank account, Gilbert wrote to Fort Worth and ordered a
duplicate set of these fireworks sent on to Cinche. And in the darkness
of night, when Blowout was wrapped in slumber, Gilbert and Romero rode
silently out, down the flank of the divide, across the plain and into a
little canon six or seven miles distant in the breaks of Wild Horse
Creek.

All day, in the intervals of his business duties, Gilbert had been
receiving theoretical in