as all there was to it." The truth remains
that the friends Jake chose were all characters only a little less
shady than himself.

Most prominent of these were the precious pair who "operated" Bill
Williams's saloon. Bill Williams was a Welshman who had drifted into
Little Missouri while the railroad was being built, and, recognizing
that the men who made money in frontier settlements were the men who
sold whiskey, had opened a saloon to serve liquid refreshment in
various vicious forms to the grading crews and soldiers.

"He always reminded me of a red fox," said Lincoln Lang long after,
"for, besides having a marked carroty complexion, there was a cunning
leer in his face which seemed, as it were, to show indistinctly
through the transparency of the manufactured grin with which he sought
to cover it. When he got mad over something or other and swept the
grin aside, I do not think that an uglier countenance ever existed on
earth or in hell. He was rather short of stature, bullet-headed and
bull-necked, with a sloping forehead and a somewhat underslung chin.
His nose was red and bulbous, his eyes narrow-set beneath bushy red
eyebrows. He had a heavy red moustache not altogether concealing an
abnormally long mouth, and through it at times, when he smiled, his
teeth showed like fangs."

He was a man of natural shrewdness, a moneymaker, a gambler, and like
Maunders (it was rumored) a brander of cattle that were not his. But
he was not without a certain attractive quality, and when he was
slightly drunk he was brilliant. He was deathly afraid of being alone,
and had a habit on those infrequent occasions when his bar was for the
moment deserted, of setting the chairs in orderly rows as in a chapel,
and then preaching to them solemnly on the relative merits of King
Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre.

His partner, Jess Hogue, was the brains of the nefarious trio, a dark,
raw-boned brute with an ugly, square-jawed, domineering face, a bellow
like a bull's, and all the crookedness of Bill Williams without his
redeeming wit. His record of achievement covered a broader field than
that of either of his associates, for it began with a sub-contract on
the New York water system, involved him with the United States
Government in connection with a certain "phantom mail route" between
Bismarck and Miles City, and started him on the road to affluence with
the acquisition of twenty-eight army mules which, with the aid of Bill
Williams a