“What’s Ben Woods want? Coming for me, is he? Well, that’s queer! They don’t pull a man in this town for a little shooting, as a usual thing, unless he kills somebody; and all I’ve been potting is an old playing card. I was a fool for even doing that—a fool and drunk, or nigh it! A man can’t slay a memory by shooting a card to pieces.” He stepped with quick stride to the side of the road, where he had a mud wall at his back; so that he was now able to face the Mexicans and also watch the crowd that hurriedly approached from the direction of the town. The patois of these peons was strange to him, but he was beginning to catch words that he understood, and slowly the meaning of what they meant filtered in. One of his bullets, glancing against a rock, had entered a Mexican jacal and struck a Mexican woman, injuring her severely. It was the husband of the woman who had tried to knife him; and her brother had run into the town and summoned the marshal with a direful story. The marshal was now coming, with a posse, to arrest the “wild American” who was supposed to be shooting up the Mexican portion of the town. The reports of the revolver had given point to the story of the woman’s brother. “Hit a woman, eh?” said Conover incredulously. “Hit a woman when I was merely shooting at the representation of one? Is that what you’re howlin’ about?” He flung a glance at the woman’s husband, who had crawled out and recovered the knife, and was again trying to get where he could use it. “Keep off!” he snarled to the man with the knife. “If I shot a woman, it was an accident, and a fool thing to do; but it wasn’t meant; and I ain’t goin’ to let you drive your sticker into me because of it. Keep off, or I’ll choke you!” The Mexicans, gaining courage by reason of the approach of the marshal and his men, began to crowd Conover, gathering in a gesticulating and frantic mob between him and the tiny Mexican huts where the women stood and yelped like coyotes. Seeing that the Mexicans were in a murderous mood, Conover now drew his revolver, coolly thrust cartridges into it, and, cocking it, he threatened them with it, as he began a slow retreat. Thus retreating, he came up against the forces of the marshal. “I surrender!” he said, turning and holding his revolver toward Ben Woods. “Whatever I’ve done was a fool trick, and unintentional.” Ben Woods, the marshal, a wiry, middle-aged borderman, came up and took the extended revolver. “What’s it mean?” he said, his men crowding in behind him and looking curiously at Conover and the excited peons. “You’ve had a fight down here?” “No,” said Conover. “It’s reported that there was a fight, and you shot a woman.” “Let me explain,” said Conover. “You know me, and you know that when I’ve been boozing, or coming out of one, that I’m a fust-class fool; and not always responsible at other times. I’d been drinking until I got up against the Woozy-wooz.” “You mean you’d had the D. T’s.”