This he proceeded to do. He turned and entered the car. For a second time he slid past blue-coated authority, in the form of a United States Deputy Marshal who was temporarily chaperoning the departing aliens. "Hold on, there: where you headed for?" "I's de poteh what takes care ob de Noble Fezant boys in de blue pants." The deputy marshal temporarily on guard had a fixed official rule of conduct: never take a chance. The Wildcat's words sounded crazy enough to entitle him to a membership card in the Traveling Nut Club. "Git in that car and sit down before I blow your head off! Where's your handcuffs?" "Cap'n, how come? Handcuffs seems so confidential." Here, for some reason unknown to the Wildcat, was the hand of the law. Inside of his parade-leading Prince Albert the Wildcat shivered and shrunk three sizes. His brow wrinkled in perplexity beneath the velvet hat, and the bright yellow plumes thereon dropped in sudden melancholy. "Lady Luck, whah at is you?" "Mumblin' to himself and wearing the craziest rig in the car--good thing I rounded up that bird." The deputy marshal added another star to his crown. "Plumb bughouse." He cast his eye over the occupants of the car. "Back to Russia. Try some of your ideas on them Bullshevik birds." He again addressed the Wildcat. "Cut out that mumblin'. All you got to do is keep still." "Cap'n, yessuh." The Wildcat removed his velvet hat and subsided in a seat beside the Hindoo agitator. "How come you got your head all tied up, boy?" he asked the Hindoo. The Anarchist didn't see fit to reply. At Omaha the guards from the western division relieved their homesick eastern brothers. "Twenty-three of them," announced the man who had captured the Wildcat. "Watch that rag-head Hindoo and that nigger in the fourth seat. He's gittin' bad, all the time mumblin' to himself about Lady Luck and Lily; he believes he's a porter." Over the miles official carelessness rode in the carload of bad actors. Only when the train stopped were the guards vigilant. Sagged down in his seat beside the Hindoo, the Wildcat reviewed a tolerably measly past. "How come?" There was no accounting for what white men would do to a boy, but somewhere in the jumble the Wildcat sensed that he had been the victim of a mistake. "Mebbe I's headed fo' jail 'count o' runnin' past de man at de gates." After a thirty-minute delay at Granger the Wildcat saw a train leave the yards. On the platform of the observation car, surrounded by half a dozen Blue Fezant Nobles of the Mysterious Mecca, he saw Lily speeding away into an isolated future. "Lily, you hoodoo, good-bye. Lady Luck, here I is." CHAPTER X 1. In the early days of detachable cuffs and ten-cent whisky there had been a difference of opinion manifest in the railroad surveying party at Granger. Part of the gang headed northward to the salmon country; the rest of them blazed a trail to the southwest, where the sand fleas live on artichokes.