Upon a midday in June, had you secretly peered through any of the windows in the cabin, you could have seen a seated man, tightly curved over the table and apparently dying in convulsions brought on by poison; for the signs of a newly finished meal were near him. There was a coffee-pot, and a dish of bacon, and three quarters of a pie. But it was merely Scipio Le Moyne endeavoring to write a letter; and no task more excruciating was known to this young man. “Dear friend,” he had begun, “i got no dictionery, but--” At this point a heavy blot had intervened as he was changing the personal pronoun into a capital I. “Oh, gosh!” he sighed, and for a while could spell no more. He sat back, staring at the paper. “It’s not to a girl,” he presently muttered. “I guess I’ll not start a fresh sheet.” And while the perspiring Scipio laid his nose to his pen and dragged himself onward from word to word, a bad old gentleman with a black coat and a white beard was coming stealthily up from the valley through the thick pines. He was still some miles away, and he meant to look in at one of the windows, and regulate his conduct according to what he should then see. He was by no means sure that Scipio had what he wanted, which was as much money as he could get, or any fraction thereof; but he had a shrewd suspicion that he could ascertain this without any extreme use of deadly weapons. Scipio Le Moyne was making his first stay in the Spit-Cat cabin, and in his mind there welled a complacency not to be justified; for when a thick roll of money is in a man’s trousers, and the man’s trousers are upon the man, and the man is writing a letter at a table, you see at once how unsafe the money is if the man’s six-shooter is lying out of reach on the bed behind him. It should be hanging at his hip, or in the armhole of his waistcoat, or stuck elsewhere handily about his immediate person. And so it would have been on any ordinary day of Scipio’s life; but alas! on this day he was writing a letter, and was therefore not quite accountable. There were many things that he did not enjoy--cooking, for example, or a bucking pony, or gun trouble in a saloon; but these worries he could usually meet. The only crisis which invariably disturbed him (except, of course, having to talk to Eastern ladies when they visited the Judge’s ranch) was to be face to face with ink and a pen. After his midday meal this noon he had reclined upon his bed, putting off the hateful moment. Thus recumbent he had unbuckled his belt for comfort and got none, for the letter made him restless. At length, with a mind absent from everything save the coming ink and pen, he had gone to them, forgetting his revolver among the rumpled blankets.