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 father's body had been taken. For Simon, though a respectable store-keeper by day, had a passion for faro which bloomed after sundown. And sometimes he heard Walker. But the window was shut and the blind was down.

That year, as it happened, September opened with a blaze of heat that the most hardened old-timer felt. The sky was brass, and the winds that came up out of the Gulf, growing hotter on the fat corn-lands of lower Texas, might have come from the pit. The high plateaux across which the Texas Pacific Railroad runs were burning; stock died of drought; the prairie was fired by the cinders of locomotives. In the 'City,' sunk between sandhills, the heat was intense, and the nerves of men gave way. They only came out at night, and then the saloons filled.

"By gosh, it's hot!" said Davies, who had been taking three days in town; "by gosh, it's hot! Sam, don't you reckon it might be a trifle cooler if that window was open?"

The bar-tender, down whose face the