Bim Bagley, back in Arizora and distracted by the unexplained mystery of his pal’s name on the hotel register, his pal’s suitcase in a hotel room but no more material trace of Grant Hickman, was knee to knee with Dr. Stooder in the latter’s office. The Doc made judicious answer: “Well, son, Jed Hawkins’ specifications of the gringo he fought with atop the crap table in the Palacio tallies pretty closely with the young man as I saw him in my office earlier in the day. But here’s the funny thing: the rurales let Hawkins go even though he laid out two of ’em with a chair. Let that fightin’ wildcat go and trotted this fellah Hickman off to the _carcel_. That’s what gets me.” Doc Stooder gave his decision with a wave of the hand. He jack-knifed his bony knees up to his chin and waited the younger man’s comment. “But what did Hawkins say started the big row?” Bim’s long face, all criss-crossed with the wind wrinkles that make desert men look older than their years, gave a vivid picture of his distress, of his eagerness to seize upon any detail that might point a solution of the mystery. Doc Stooder recited with picturesque detail Jed Hawkins’ story of the battle in the gambling palace as the redoubtable Jed himself had narrated it in the Border Delight pool hall before returning to his ranch at Dos Cabezas. “That give me a clue,” he concluded, “so I laid my pipe lines an’ I’m looking for to tap a well any time now.” Doc Stooder’s pipe lines--of information, if not of wealth--were the most productive of any along the Border. He was one of those rare white men in the Southwestern country who enjoyed the unreserved respect if not the love of the Mexican population, among whom nine-tenths of his practice extended. Though he bawled at his patients, stricken dumb with terror of their ailments, though he cursed the women and manhandled the men, no poor Mexican’s hovel of ’dobe was too far out in the desert to discourage Doc Stooder’s night prowling gas-wagon. Through dust storm and withering heat this blasted jack-pine of a man flitted on wings of gasoline, with his nostrums for dysentery and asthma, his splints for broken bones and needles for knife thrusts. Drunk he might be half the time, an indifferent physician all the time--for the Doc had not been away from the Border for twenty-five years and never read a medical magazine. But under his hard rind of brutalities and cynicisms the Mexicans and Indians had come to discover a deep sympathy with their homely tragedies, their patient sufferings. Sometimes they paid him in coin; more often they paid him in slavish fealty the coin of which was information. Of gold strikes in the far hills; of shrewd business deals to be wrought through connivance of knavish officials across the Line; even of stolen jewels to be picked up from a pawnbroker:--these the flow of Doc Stooder’s pipe lines. No man on the Border for a hundred miles each way knew so much of the scrapple of life as A. Stooder, M.D.