"But the beauty of it all," he went on, "was the way you worked together.
If any one of you hadn't 'come through' at the same second, the jig would
have been up. Who figured it out?"

"Here's the slow thinker that did it," said Dick, clapping Bert on the
shoulder.

"That's the bonehead, sure enough," echoed Tom.

"Oh, come off," growled Bert, flushing a little and fidgeting uneasily in
his seat. "There was a whole lot of luck about it, anyway. If we hadn't
had the paperweight, all the thinking in the world wouldn't have done us
a bit of good."

"If you hadn't had the thinking, all the paperweights in the world
wouldn't have done us a bit of good," corrected Tom.

"Well, there's glory enough for all," smiled the conductor. "The main
point is that you fellows have put me and the company under a load of
gratitude and obligation that we can never repay. Call it quick thinking,
quick acting, or both--you turned the trick."

"It had to be a case of 'the quick or the dead,'" grinned Tom.

"Sure thing," assented the conductor. "You were the quick and those two
rascals are the dead. Or will be before long," he added grimly. "I'll
turn them over to the sheriff at the next station. There's a hand bill
in the baggage car describing a band of outlaws that the authorities of
three States have been after for a long time for robbery and murder, and
two of the descriptions fit these fellows to a dot. There's a price on