frying-pan. He cut the steak in half, and served Jim and himself.

"Eat her while she's hot," he counselled, and with knife and fork set the
example.

"She's a dandy," was Jim's judgment, after his first mouthful. "But I tell
you one thing straight. I'm never goin' to visit you on that Arizona
ranch, so you needn't ask me."

"What's the matter now?" Matt asked.

"Hell's the matter," was the answer. "The Mexican cookin' on your ranch'd
be too much for me. If I've got hell a-comin' in the next life, I'm not
goin' to torment my insides in this one. Damned peppers!"

He smiled, expelled his breath forcibly to cool his burning mouth, drank
some coffee, and went on eating the steak.

"What do you think about the next life anyway, Matt?" he asked a little
later, while secretly he wondered why the other had not yet touched his
coffee.

"Ain't no next life," Matt answered, pausing from the steak to take his
first sip of coffee. "Nor heaven nor hell, nor nothin'. You get all
that's comin' right here in this life."

"An' afterward?" Jim queried out of his morbid curiosity, for he knew that
he looked upon a man that was soon to die. "An' afterward?" he repeated.

"Did you ever see a man two weeks dead?" the other asked.