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 head. He had taken on a little too much before starting out to clean up the dance, which the jolt against the main-line rail had not altogether offset. Mickey Sweat and the jerries had gone back to the kegs, there being a full one yet to account for before they could rightly turn in and call it a night, assured by Dr. Hall that he would not need their highly appreciated services again.

The jerries were not deeply concerned over the affair. They had little sympathy, and less admiration, for any man who went out with a gun in his fist to do his fighting, and precious small interest in him when he came down to merited grief at the end. The jerries did not hold the men whose guns Nance had locked in the depot a bit more worthy than the one who had dispersed them with his weapon. Give them a little time to knock the pick-handles out and they would have pounded to the charge, scornful of any weapons but their own, and landed without discrimination or favor on the head of every man with a gun, let him be friend or foe to the town.

Dr. Hall closed his door while he worked over the victim of the unexplained shot which probably had saved his own life. Gus Sandiver was ill-favored and morose of visage, forty-five or fifty years of age, narrow-shouldered, extremely thin and tall. His legs were so long that his high-heeled boots with fancy tops—there was a white star stitched into each of them—struck him about midway of his bony shank. There was not bulk enough, together with leg and pantaloon, to fill the boot-tops out and hold them snugly up where they belonged. In consequence of this the leather had sagged down and wrinkled, giving the man a skinny appearance in that region, altogether depraved and mean.