Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/256

 his business; that, and running booze joints. Mining camps and brand-new boom towns were Clancy's meat mostly—after Perley drove him out of Big Cloud.

Don't ask me. I don't know what there was between them. That was before my time. A woman probably—a woman's generally blamed anyhow. Anyway, one night Perley got the drop on Breed and marched him down the street in front of his pistol and out of the town. After that, Clancy kept away from Big Cloud. As I say, that part was before my time. I only know there was bad blood between them; wicked bad blood on one side, as you'll see. Clancy disappeared from Big Cloud, and the two didn't foul each other again until Coyote Bend started.

Breed Clancy hit the Bend with the first inrush of the miners, and before any of them had time to much more than get a pick into the ground he was busy knocking together a bit of a shack he called a hotel, and was ordering the furnishings—liquid furnishings, you understand—from Big Cloud.

There were three barrels of it, the hardest kind of fire water that ever went into the mountains waybilled to Clancy at Coyote Bend by the local, on the first trip that Charlie Lee ever made with Matt Perley. I'm getting back to Lee now, you see.

Well, it was about noon when they whistled for the Bend that day, and Lee, riding the brake wheels on the front end, could see about a dozen "blankets" squatting alongside the right of way about where the train would stop. Grouped behind these were a number of stragglers from the camp, among whom was a