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 if he had spoken the most surprising and shocking words that had ever reached her ears.

"That man!" Mrs. Ellison said, looking from one to the other in fearful amazement. "I might have known, I might have known!"

The sheriff nodded again, his broad mouth shut so close it made a line across his face.

"No doubt about it," he said. "He was quite an eminent bank robber," he explained, seeing the question in Simpson's eyes. "He'd held up several trains, and robbed a government paymaster or two, and killed more men than he had fingers and toes, I guess. He had his hangout down in the hills along the Salt Fork in the Nation. We all knew that. But nobody ever tracked him to it. If he did he never come back. Ye-es, he was quite an eminent man."

Simpson did not appear to be greatly impressed. He had a wagon jack under a hind axle, and had been smearing the thimble with grease when the sheriff arrived. He resumed smoothing the grease with a wooden paddle after a little "Um-m-m," which seemed adequately to express his full appreciation of the border character's importance.

Sheriff Treadwell seemed somewhat affronted at the apparent indifference or plain dumbness of this stranger. He turned a sharp, frowning look on Simpson, who had picked up the lynch-pin of the old-time prairie freight wagon and was scraping the caked grease off with his paddle.

"You may not be able to throw in another lucky shot like that, kid, next time you meet that bunch," the sheriff