Pool Clayton had been with the band less than a week, and was finding the life anything but what he had pictured it. The men were rougher and coarser and more brutal than he had imagined; and altogether the delightful stir and excitement had not been what he anticipated. Snaky Pete, whom he knew only too well, had been cruelly harsh, and had told him he was a coward and a milksop, and needed “hardening.” Already there had been several attempts to “harden” him; that is, to brutalize him, from which he had shrunk. This last attempt, however, had gone beyond anything he had dreamed of; when he was ordered to kill a man in cold blood, just as if that man were no more than a wolf. Clayton had not been able to do it; and this was the result--struck senseless to the ground, and abandoned on the lonely prairie. “Mebbe I’d better go back to the town,” he said; “I ain’t fit for this.” But back in the town officers were watching for him for some small offense against the law; and he abandoned the thought of doing that when he recalled the fact. There seemed nothing he could do except follow the outlaws and rejoin them. He believed that long before he could overtake them the old trapper would be murdered and put out of the way, and that murder, at least, would not be forced on him. “I s’pose I can bear the boys chaffing and joking me,” he mused. “And I reckon I do need hardening, if I’m to keep with ’em, and lead this life. I reckon I am a sort of milksop and weak.” Yet he could not feel right toward Snaky Pete. A feeling that was murderous burned in his very soul against the brutal outlaw leader. “That he should treat me that way--he!--when he’d ought to be my best friend! I wouldn’t joined ’em, but fer the fact that I learned he was the leader; and now to have him treat me that way!” After a while, when he felt better and stronger, he rose from the fire and got his horse. Then he mounted, and rode away in the direction of Poplar Bluffs, the camping place of which he knew. His evil tendencies, and evil surroundings and past, had conquered again; he meant to rejoin the road agents, and “face the music,” whatever it might be. CHAPTER VII. TAUNTS AND JEERS. Pool Clayton reached Poplar Bluffs, an isolated point on the river, at the foot of a spur of the Sepulcher Mountains, after daylight, but he did not at once venture into the camp. He could not summon up enough courage until he saw a number of outlaws ride away from the camp, and guessed that one of them was Snaky Pete. When he entered the camp he found but few of the outlaws there, and those few seemed to be under command of a young fellow not much older than himself. This young fellow was a weasel-eyed, rat-faced youth, named Tom Molloy, as desperate a character for his years as one could wish to see.