"We'll take a chance, Ben," he said. "And, after all, one man's bane is
another man's bread, you know. Now I've told you my tale, let's have
yours. You saw Honeycutt; could you get anything out of him?"

"Only this, that you are dead right about his knowing or thinking that
he knows. He is feebler than he was last fall, a great deal feebler both
in body and mind. All day he sits on his steps in the sun and peers
through his bleary eyes across the mountains, and chuckles to himself
like an old hen. 'Oh, I know what you're after,' he cackles at me,
shrewd enough to hit the nail square, too, Mark. 'And,' he rambles on,
'you've come to the right man. But am I goin' to blab now, havin' kept a
shut mouth all these years?' And then he goes on, his rheumy-red eyes
blinking, to proclaim that he is feeling a whole lot stronger these
days, that he is getting his second wind, so to speak; that come
mid-spring he'll be as frisky as a colt, and that then he means to have
what is his own! And that is as close as he ever comes to saying
anything. About this one thing, I mean. He'll chatter like a magpie
about anything else, even his own youthful evil deeds. He seems to know
somehow that no longer has the law any interest in his old carcass, and
begins to brag a bit of the wild days up and down the forks of the
American and of his own share in it all; half lies and the other half
blood-dripping truth, I'd swear. It makes a man shiver to listen to the
old cut-throat."

"He can't live a thousand years," mused King. "He is eighty now, if he's
a day."

"Eighty-four by his own estimate. But when it's a question of that, he
sits there and sucks at his toothless old gums and giggles that it's the