'I have come round to have a bit of a talk with you,' the man said, as he seated himself on a box near the fire. 'Linda has been telling me that you are the man I saw at New Orleans, and that you followed us here. She has also been telling me what you came for, and the girl is downright cut up about it. Up till now I have never known the rights of the job she and Warbles had done in England. She has not told me much about it now, only that she acted the part of another girl and got things in her name, and that the other girl has been suspected of it, and that you want to clear her. Now when I first saw her at New Orleans I took an oath I would do what I could for her, and would see that she was not wronged in any way. I have been watching her pretty close for some time. I could see she liked you. If you had pretended to be fond of her so as to wheedle her into doing what you wanted in this business, and had then chucked her over, I would have thought no more of shooting you than I would of putting my heel on a rattler's head; but I am bound to say that you haven't. I could see that whatever your game was, you were not trying to make her like you; and when I said something about it, when she was talking to me, she flared up and said that you had never been more than civil to her, and there was no thought of love between you. 'I don't think she quite spoke the truth on her side, but that was only natural. Anyhow, I don't feel any grudge against you, and it is only to make things best for her that I have come here. There is nothing hardly I would not do for her, and I want to make things as smooth as possible. You behaved like a man in that affair with Wyoming Bill, and I guess as you are at the head of Judge Lynch's band, and I look upon you as a straight man, and I am not afraid of talking straight to you. It was I who set that nigger on you at New Orleans. I knew nothing about you except that you would have spoilt our plans, and might even get her arrested. Your life was nothing to me one way or another; I had got to stop you and I did it. I told the nigger to hit you so that you would be laid up for a time, but not to kill you; but when I did so I tell you I didn't care the turn of a straw whether he killed you or not. I have been thinking over for the last hour what I had best do, and I concluded to come to you and put it to you straight. 'Warbles is pretty nigh rubbed out; I doubt if he will get round; he takes a lot of liquor every night, and always has done, and that tells against a man's chances when he is hurt. You know well enough that you could do nothing against the girl here. If a sheriff came to arrest her the boys would pretty well tear him to pieces, but the chap that could travel as you have done, from England to the States, and then across to California, would certainly be ready to wait and bide his time, and sooner or later you would catch her.'