The authorities knew that someone had perished in that explosion, but
whether it was one man or two they could not tell.




THE SHADOW OF THE GREENBACK.


Hickory Sam needed but one quality to be perfect. He should have been
an arrant coward. He was a blustering braggart, always boasting of the
men he had slain, and the odds he had contended against; filled with
stories of his own valour, but alas! he shot straight, and rarely
missed his mark, unless he was drunker than usual. It would have been
delightful to tell how this unmitigated ruffian had been "held up" by
some innocent tenderfoot from the East, and made to dance at the muzzle
of a quite new and daintily ornamented revolver, for the loud-mouthed
blowhard seemed just the man to flinch when real danger confronted him;
but, sad to say, there was nothing of the white feather about Hickory
Sam, for he feared neither man, nor gun, nor any combination of them.
He was as ready to fight a dozen as one, and once had actually "held
up" the United States army at Fort Concho, beating a masterly retreat
backwards with his face to the foe, holding a troop in check with his
two seven-shooters that seemed to point in every direction at once,
making every man in the company feel, with a shiver up his back, that
he individually was "covered," and would be the first to drop if firing
actually began.

Hickory Sam appeared suddenly in Salt Lick, and speedily made good his
claim to be the bad man of the district. Some old-timers disputed Sam's