Nate Rainey, a hatchet-faced man, with a billy-goat tuft of whiskers on the tip of his chin, popped up like the occupant of a toy jack-in-box. Every one there was yelling his name, and he flushed with pride. The scene was the wide piazza in front of the Flash Light, and the time late afternoon. In the street were several score men of the border type--miners, cowboys, ranchmen--together with the scum and rabble always to be found in such a place. Few of the reputable citizens of the town of Scarlet Gulch were in that noisy crowd; they had something more important to do than to hang round Nate Rainey’s saloon and listen to the big words of Bug-eye Slocum. But all the dangerous elements of the community were represented, from the blackleg gambler to the cheap street loafer. “I ain’t no orator, like what my friend Slocum is,” Nate Rainey apologized, as he stood before the yelling mob, “er I’d try ter make ye a speech. It’s acts that talks fer me, says I; and so I say, jist bring Buffler Bill before me, and prove that he’s been doin’ these hyer things that everybody says he’s doin’, and up he goes, at the end of a rope, quick’s a cat kin wink her eye; and now you hear me!” Then everybody yelled, and they yelled again, louder than ever, when Rainey invited them to step into the Flash Light and “likker” at his expense. The situation at Scarlet Gulch, as set forth by Slocum and Rainey, was singular. For, if credible reports were to be believed, Buffalo Bill had departed from his traditional honor, and had not only engaged in holdups and robbery of various kinds, but had organized a band of blacklegs and cutthroats, who had become known popularly as “Buffalo Bill’s Border Ruffians.” Who the members of this desperado organization were no one could say; but it was a fair supposition that many of them lived in Scarlet Gulch itself, and probably some of them were in the crowd before the Flash Light cheering the words of Rainey and Slocum. As strange as anything in this situation, according to the reports, was that, when Buffalo Bill first came into that section, he had come in his customary capacity as the upholder of law and order. He had been there but a short time, however, when he was caught robbing the safe of the First National Bank, which he blew open with a stick of dynamite, getting all the money in the cash drawer. He had been seen and recognized, and after that he had been too wise to exhibit himself openly in the town; though his Border Ruffians soon began to make things warm for travelers on the surrounding trails, and had once ridden boldly, by night, into Scarlet Gulch, and robbed Payson’s hardware store, in the very busiest section. The men who crowded to the bar of the Flash Light to accept Rainey’s invitation to “likker up” talked of these things, and threatened what they would do when Buffalo Bill was caught.