himself down to that business. Wotever he'd been and done himself he
made it all right with the sheriff here; and I've heard ez it wasn't
anything criminal or that sort, but that it was o' some private trouble
that he'd confided to that hound Bob, and Bob had threatened to tell
agen him. That's the grudge they say Johnson has, and that's why he's
allowed to be the head devil in this yer affair. It's an understood
thing, too, that the sheriff and the police ain't goin' to interfere if
Johnson accidentally blows the top of Bob's head off in the scrimmage of
a capter."

"And I reckon Bob wouldn't hesitate to do the same thing to him when he
finds out that Johnson has given him away?"

"I reckon," said the other, sententiously, "for it's Johnson's knowledge
of the country and the hoss-stealers that are in with Bob's gang of road
agents that made it easy for him to buy up and win over Bob's friends
here, so that they'd help to trap him."

"It's pretty rough on Bob to be sold out in that way," said the second
speaker, sympathizingly.

"If they were white men, p'rhaps," returned his companion,
contemptuously, "but this yer's a case of Injin agen Injin, ez the men
are Mexican half-breeds just as Bob's a half Cherokee. The sooner that
kind o' cross cattle exterminate each other the better it'll be for the
country. It takes a white man like Johnson to set 'em by the ears."

A silence followed. Ezekiel, beginning to be slightly bored with his
cheaply acquired but rather impractical information, was about to slip
back into the passage again when he was arrested by a laugh from the