without word or greeting to anybody. It is Flint Buckner. As the door
closes behind him a buzz of talk breaks out.

"The regularest man that ever was," said Jake Parker, the blacksmith:
"you can tell when it's twelve just by him leaving, without looking at
your Waterbury."

"And it's the only virtue he's got, as fur as I know," said Peter Hawes,
miner.

"He's just a blight on this society," said Wells-Fargo's man, Ferguson.
"If I was running this shop I'd make him say something, some time or
other, or vamos the ranch." This with a suggestive glance at the
barkeeper, who did not choose to see it, since the man under discussion
was a good customer, and went home pretty well set up, every night, with
refreshments furnished from the bar.

"Say," said Ham Sandwich, miner, "does any of you boys ever recollect of
him asking you to take a drink?"

"Him? Flint Buckner? Oh, Laura!"

This sarcastic rejoinder came in a spontaneous general outburst in one
form of words or another from the crowd. After a brief silence, Pat
Riley, miner, said:

"He's the 15-puzzle, that cuss. And his boy's another one. I can't make
them out."

"Nor anybody else," said Ham Sandwich; "and if they are 15-puzzles how