year. Sit down and have a smoke. Tell you about it.”

The partners subsided limply into two worn and shiny old chairs and gravely eyed him.

“One time,” he said, as if to give his story a true narrative flavor, “there was two of the slickest crooks and card sharks who ever flimmed a mutt, sailed on a ship. They’d done it before—lots of times, and got away with many a hick’s vacation money. That’s Crump Smith and Slippery Murdock. They pick up a rube calling himself Lucky Cochran. Regular backwoods goat. Moss on his back an inch thick. Hay in his whiskers. Birds’ nests in his hair. Nice old man that talks all about himself every time he can get any one to listen long enough. Funny old cuss with a sense of humor. Some of the time he’s been in Texas. Some of the time, mind you. For—say—the last five or six years.

“This pair of slick guys set out to do him until a busted and dried bladder would look bigger than a circus tent in comparison with what he’ll be like when they get through with him. Now, what I guess is that this fine old gentleman thought that he’d found a couple of miners who were worth lookin’ after and so hung on to them; but when they didn’t prove worth his while, he grins to himself and says, ‘I’ll devote a few idle hours to this pair of smart Alecks that are cruising the seas of adventure, because it’s a rule of mine to make somebody else pay my traveling expenses.’”

He stopped, grinned again, threw his paper to one side, and, lowering one leg that had been crossed over the other, leaned toward them.

“Settling down to business, and all fooling aside,” he said with an abrupt change to seriousness, “the man you knew as Lucky Cochran, the rancher, is nobody but ‘Peerless’ Carfield, the sharpest, cleverest, coolest, shrewdest man who ever skinned a sucker and then sympathized with him over his loss. He’d gamble with a rabbit for its winter’s nest. The only thing that’s to his credit is that he’d most likely hand it back after he’d won it. He’d win a squatter’s farm, and then, if he wasn’t short himself, hand it back to the squat, and tell him how to clear the title.

“Nobody can put anything across with him. He’s had ’em all, from New York to New South Wales, and from London to Lima. Crump Smith and Slippery Murdock were a pair of infants in his mitts. He won everything they had, from their bank roll down to their shoe buttons, and then, just as a joke, left ’em hung up with you two standin’ guard over ’em when he got off the boat and grabbed a taxicab for the 

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