him, by gad, I hadn't men enough to guard the public property here at the post. The quartermaster's depot was responsible for most of them being away, let them take care of their own." Gate City Hotel was alive with loungers that night waiting for the Engineer. At half-past nine he had come from the quartermaster's corral, and after a few minutes had gone away with Mr. Folsom, who drove up in his carriage. He was up at the old man's now, said the impatient ones, fooling away the time with the girls when he ought to be there answering their questions and appeasing their curiosity. The talk turned on the probable whereabouts of Burleigh and his "pals." So had the mighty fallen that the lately fawning admirers now spoke of the fugitive as a criminal. He couldn't follow the Union Pacific East; everybody knew him, and by this time officers were on the lookout for him all along the road. He had reached Cheyenne, that was known, and had driven away from there up the valley of Crow Creek with two companions. Loring himself had ascertained this in Cheyenne, but it was the sheriff who gave out the information. He was in hiding, declared the knowing ones, in some of the haunts of Birdsall's fellows east of Laramie City, a growing town of whose prowess at poker and keno Gate City was professionally aware and keenly jealous. He might hide there a day or two and then get out of the country by way of the Sweetwater along the old stage route to Salt Lake or skip southward and make for Denver. Northward he dare not go. There were the army posts along the Platte; beyond them the armed hosts of Indians, far more to be dreaded than all the sheriffs' posses on the plains. Half-past ten came and still no Loring, and the round of drinks were getting monotonous. Judge Pardee, a bibulous and oracular limb of the law, had been chosen inquisitor-general, with powers to call for all the news that was stowed away in that secretive "knowledge-box" on the shoulders of the Engineer. Gate City had resolved and "'lowed" that a man reputed to know so much should be held up and compelled to part with at least a little. Jimmy Peters, the landlord's boy, scouting out to Folsom's, came back on the run, breathless from three-quarters of a mile of panting through that rare atmosphere, to say that he had just seen a couple of officers ride away to the fort, and old man Folsom with "the Engineer feller" were coming out the front gate. They'd be along in a few minutes. So in their eagerness some of the loungers strolled out in front and gazed westward up the long, broad, hard-beaten street on which, in many a spot, the bunch grass of the prairie still lingered. It was a lovely summer night, warm, starlit, but the baby moon had early sunk to rest, and the darkness was intense. Yet the first men to come forth could have sworn they saw two horsemen, dim and shadowy, go loping across the broad thoroughfare from north to south, at the first cross street.