ld
not let it go at that.

"Are yuh whipped to a finish, so that yuh don't want any more trouble
with anybody?" he wanted to know.

Spikes hesitated but the fraction of a second before he growled a
reluctant yes.

"Are yuh a low-down, lying sneak of a woman-fighter, that ain't got
nerve enough to stand up square to a ten-year-old boy?"

Spikes acknowledged that he was. Before the impromptu catechism was
ended, Spikes had acknowledged other and more humiliating things--to
the delectation of the bartender, the stage driver and two or three men
of leisure who were listening.

When Spikes had owned to being every mean, unknowable thing that Weary
could call to mind--and his imagination was never of the barren
sort--Weary generously permitted him to get upon his feet and skulk out
to where his horse was tied. After that, Weary gave his unruffled
attention to the stage driver and discovered the unwelcome fact that
there was no letter and no telegram for one William Davidson, who
looked a bit glum when he heard it.

So he, too, went out and mounted Glory and rode away to the ranch where
waited the horses; and as he went he thought, for perhaps the first
time in his life, some hard and unflattering things of Chip Bennett.
He had never dreamed Chip would calmly overlook his needs and leave him
in the lurch like this.

At the ranch, when he had unsaddled Glory and gone to the bunk-house,
he discovered Irish, Pink and Happy Jack wrangling amicably over whom a
certain cross-eyed girl on the train had been looking at most of the
time. Since each one claimed all the glances for himself, and since
there seemed no possible way of settling the dispute, they gave over
the attempt gladly when Weary appeared, and wanted to know, first
thing, who or what had been gouging the hide off his face.

Weary, not aware until the moment that he was wounded, answered that he
had done it shaving; at which the three hooted derision and wanted to
know since when he had taken to shaving his nose. Weary smiled
inscrutably and began talking of something else until he had weaned
them from the subject, and learned that they had bribed the stage
driver to let them off at this particular ranch; for the stage driver
knew Irish, and knew also that a man he had taken to be Irish was
making this place his headquarters. The stage driver was one of those
male gossips who know everything.

When he could conveniently do so, Weary took Irish out of hea