“Cody, is it not?” said the little man, addressing the scout. “The same,” the scout answered. “Have a chair with us. These are my good friends, Nick Nomad and Baron von Schnitzenhauser.” “Glad ter meet up with ye,” said Nomad, as the stranger tucked himself into the first chair. “Aber I tond’t knowed you, I gan say der same py mineselluf,” seconded the German. The stranger regarded them closely. “Thanks!” he said. “I think all you fellers was up at Juniper Joe’s when he took them shots at me.” “Ouch! We seen idt! One of dose pullets vhistled so close py mine ear dot I t’ink I can hear him yidt.” “I fancy they didn’t come as close to you as to me!” The little man ran his hand through his hair, and revealed a red welt on his forehead, just under the hair he had lifted. “One of them came as near to me as that. I wonder it didn’t knock me out. I still had enough sense to pull for the lamp, as I went down; then I crawled out through the door, and got away.” He looked at the three men curiously, as if wondering what they thought of it. “It was quick shooting!” was the comment of Buffalo Bill. The man had not yet introduced himself; and the scout did not forget that Juniper Joe had charged him with being Benson, the road agent, a man the scout had never met, but whom he wished right then he could surely lay his hands on. In truth, Buffalo Bill and his friends had been discussing this very man when he appeared at the door and came in. “What was said about me, after the shooting?” the stranger asked, drawing one leg over the other and settling into an easy attitude. “I suppose you want us to be quite frank with you?” said the scout. “That’s what I’m expecting, gents. I knew something would be said, and I fancied you heard it. I confess I got away so quick that, whatever it was, I lost it. The climate there didn’t seem healthy for me; so I tried as fast as I could to change it.” He smiled, then--a thin-lipped smile, that had little merriment in it. “Juniper Joe declared,” the scout told him directly, “that you were Tim Benson, the outlaw and road agent; that he recognized you, as soon as you came through the door, as being the man who had held up a stage at Holbrook and robbed it, getting five thousand dollars of his money; for which he had sworn to kill you on sight.” That thin-lipped smile, sneering now, became evident again. “A clever yarn, to be made up so quickly!” “Then, it wasn’t true?” the scout queried. “Not a word of it. On the contrary, instead of being Tim Benson, I am Jackson Dane, of San Francisco, in the detective business, and came here looking for Tim Benson myself.” “Ach! Iss dot so-o?” gasped the baron. “It’s so.” “Py yiminy, dhen----” But the scout cut in, to keep the baron from making some damaging statement: “I suppose there must be something in your general appearance which caused Juniper Joe to make that fool mistake?” The stranger laughed at that. “If so, it came near being a fatal blunder for me!”