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 to circulate around and see who he could bump into, his acquaintance on the range running far.

Wallace was a sort of self-appointed comedian, a harmless, unaggressive man as humorists of that type usually are. He had bought a bright nickeled badge at a pawnshop in Kansas City, with the word DETECTIVE engraved on it, picking it out from a wide selection covering the various executive branches of civil government—constable, police, sheriff—grinning his big horse teeth with inward satisfaction as he pinned it on his shirt and buttoned it out of sight under his vest.

There promised to be more fun in a detective badge than any other. Going on a long and wide experience, Wallace knew that the simple word "detective" would raise more hair in the general run of cow-camps than anything ever put up in bottles.

Not that anybody in the Bar-Heart-Bar outfit was hiding out as far as Wallace knew. He hadn't a thought of probing any man's conscience when he polished up the badge and hid it away under his vest, only of flashing it and playing mysterious until the time for the big laugh came. He had pulled the trick on his comrades coming down on the train, even nonchalantly exposing the badge to the brakeman's eye and leaving that eminent railroad official swinging between wonder and doubt to the parting.

Now Wallace went circulating around, grinning away to himself like a beaver, planning to expose his badge in a sort of accidental, unthinking way when he had a bunch of the boys around him, and get his laugh out of the various expressions of alarm, consternation and curi-