lippery, who was tall, and sallow, and lean, and unkempt, and who
looked consumptive and otherwise unwholesome, grinned sheepishly, as he
replied:

"I reckon my name ought to answer that question. I slips in and I slips
out where I can and when I can, and picks up anything that's lying
around."

Madge laughed scornfully.

"You don't look as if you had sense enough to hate anybody or anything,"
she said.

"Oh, I hate Nick Carter, right enough," was the unhesitating reply.

"Why do you hate him?"

"Because he sent my father and my mother and my two brothers to prison,
and they're all there now, and they weren't doing a thing that
interfered with him in any way."

"What were they doing?" asked Madge.

"Well, if you want to know it straight, Black Madge, they was running a
little counterfeit plant of their own--making dimes and quarters and a
few half dollars for some of us to blow in when we couldn't find the
real rhino."

"Running a counterfeit plant, eh?"

"That's it, marm."

"And Nick Carter sent them all to prison, did he?"

"He did that."

"How does it happen that he didn't send you along with them?"

"Well, I managed to slip out just in time," said Slippery, with one of
his sheepish grins; "but he sent a bullet after me when I was running
away that singed the hair over my right ear, and taking it all in all I
hate him about as much as anybody."

"Not enough to kill him if I should ask you to do it, do you?"

"Well, Madge, when it comes to killing, that ain't in my line; but if
you want me to lead him on somehow where somebody else could do the job,
I think I'd be about the covey that could do it."

"That'll do for you. Sit down, Slippery."

"What's your name?" she added to the man who was next him.

A dark, beetle-browed, heavy-jawed, coarse-featured man, who looked as
if he was as powerful as a giant, rose slowly to his feet, and replied
in a surly tone, and with an ugly glitter in his eyes:

"I have got about forty names; leastwise, the police say I have; but
they as knows me best calls me Bob for short; sometimes they fixes it up
a little by calling it Surly Bob. But I think that Bob will do for you."

"What have you got against Nick Carter, Surly Bob?" asked Madge,
smiling. She liked the looks of this hard-featured individual. He was
just brutal enough in his appearance to satisfy her ideas of what a man
should be.

Bob deliberately took a huge chew of tobacco into his mouth before he