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 questions about the animal, and Wallace, restrained by the delicacy that most men of his calling felt in those perilous days about prying into another's purely personal affairs, held his tongue, although Simpson saw it was bulging in his mouth like a bale of hay.

"That's the horse I rode down," he explained. "It belongs to a man by the name of Waco Johnson. I'd been down to Drumwell on it, so it escaped the raid."

"Oh, that's the one," said the sheriff. "The feller they shot in the leg."

"I was wonderin' if that old cuss rambled down here and you had to take a gun to him," Wallace said. "Is he over at the Block E?"

"I left him there," Tom replied.

"Yes," the sheriff said, "he'll hang up there some time. He hadn't come to when I was past there day before yesterday evening."

Wallace was greatly interested in Waco Johnson's adventures since Coburn fired him, and pleased to learn that he had found a harbor in such kind hands as Mrs. Ellison and her daughter.

"Coburn missed it a mile when he thought that feller was crooked," Wallace declared, although he had not been above suspecting Waco himself not two minutes before. "Some of the boys suspicioned him, but I said hell! if a man's crooked because he goes on a toot and misses the train I ort 'a' been hung ten years ago and severial times since."

Wallace chuckled, but not at the review of these many deserved hangings for his train delinquencies, as it was speedily revealed.