As I completed this hasty scrutiny of the room and its inmates, the bar-keeper gave me my squash, and I drank eagerly. The excitement had made me thirsty, for I knew that the crisis must be at hand, but I experienced no other sensation save that my heart was thumping and my throat was dry. Yawning as a sign of indifference (I had resolved to be as deliberate as the Sheriff) I put my hand in my pocket on the revolver. I felt that I could draw it out at once. I addressed the bar-keeper: “Say, do you know the folk here in Osawotamie?” After a pause he replied: “Most on 'em, I guess.” Another pause and a second question: “Do you know Tom Williams?” The eyes looked at me with a faint light of surprise in them; they looked away again, and came back with short, half suspicious, half curious glances. “Maybe you're a friend of his'n?” “I don't know him, but I'd like to meet him.” “Would you, though?” Turning half round, the bar-keeper took down a bottle and glass, and poured out some whisky, seemingly for his own consumption. Then: “I guess he's not hard to meet, isn't Williams, ef you and me mean the same man.” “I guess we do,” I replied; “Tom Williams is the name.” “That's me,” said the tall man who was leaning on the bar near me, “that's my name.” “Are you the Williams that stopped Judge Shannon yesterday?” “I don't know his name,” came the careless reply, “but I stopped a man in a buck-board.” Plucking out my revolver, and pointing it low down on his breast, I said: “I'm sent to arrest you; you must come with me to Kiota.” Without changing his easy posture, or a muscle of his face, he asked in the same quiet voice: “What does this mean, anyway? Who sent you to arrest me?” “Sheriff Johnson,” I answered. The man started upright, and said, as if amazed, in a quick, loud voice: “Sheriff Johnson sent _you_ to arrest me?” “Yes,” I retorted, “Sheriff Samuel Johnson swore me in this morning as his deputy, and charged me to bring you into Kiota.” In a tone of utter astonishment he repeated my words, “Sheriff Samuel Johnson!” “Yes,” I replied, “Samuel Johnson, Sheriff of Elwood County.” “See here,” he asked suddenly, fixing me with a look of angry suspicion, “what sort of a man is he? What does he figger like?” “He's a little shorter than I am,” I replied curtly, “with a brown beard and bluish eyes--a square-built sort of man.” “Hell!” There was savage rage and menace in the exclamation. “You kin put that up!” he added, absorbed once more in thought. I paid no attention to this; I was not going to put the revolver away at his bidding. Presently he asked in his ordinary voice: “What age man might this Johnson be?” “About forty or forty-five, I should think.” “And right off Sam Johnson swore you in and sent you to bring me into Kiota--an' him Sheriff?” “Yes,” I replied impatiently, “that's so.”