“We can’t give you any receipt for him as you requested,” continued Hepburn, drawing a paper out of his pocket; “but here’s an acknowledgment that his capture is due to information furnished by you. I guess that will answer the purpose. You won’t have any trouble getting the reward.” He handed the paper to Carleton. The super took it mechanically, and started as it crackled in his fingers. “Now,” said Hepburn briskly, “I don’t want to appear abrupt, but there’s a local East at two-twenty. We’ll move along, Shorty. Good-by, Mr. Carleton. Next time you’re in Denver look us up.” He took Marley’s arm and moved toward the door. “Don’t--tell her, Mr. Carleton”--there was a catch in Marley’s voice, and the words came low. Carleton did not answer. He was staring at the paper in his hand--Marley’s price. Regan had turned his back, with a hasty movement of his fist to his eyes. “Don’t tell her”--the plea came again from the doorway. Carleton tried to speak and his voice broke, then he cleared his throat. “She will never know, Marley,” he said huskily. X--THE MAN! WHO DIDN’T COUNT He was a little gray-haired hostler, wiper, sweeper, assistant night man in the roundhouse at Big Cloud, anything you like, and this is the story he told me one night, leaning against the blackened jamb of one of the big doors, wiping his hands occasionally upon a hunk of greasy waste. They were a rough lot out in the mountains in the days when the Hill Division was shaking her steel into something like a permanent right of way--a pretty rough lot. The railroaders because they had to be; the rest because they were just that way naturally. Miners and Indians made up the citizenship mostly, and there’s no worse mixture. They’ve got the redskins corralled on reserves now; but they hadn’t then, and it didn’t take more than one bad word and one drop of bad whisky to set things in lively motion. There’s a few highfaluting poems, and some other things, about the noble red man that works you up so when you read them that you get to wishing the Almighty had seen fit to let you be a red man, too. Well, that’s all right in its way because, after you’ve rubbed elbows with some of the real thing, you realize that the world owes the poets a living just as much as it does anybody else, and that what they say has to sound good; so you just come to keep the cautionary signals up by instinct, and let it go at that. But, to give the poets their due, there’s one thing they never trip up on, and that’s the Indian’s compound efficiency for smell. The Indian can smell. When he sticks out his chest, faces southeast, and begins to draw in the God-given mountain air, you’re free to bet that the distilleries down Kentucky way are doing enough business to make regular dividend checks a sure thing. That’s generally good whisky. Bad whisky, in smell and otherwise, carries farther--and it’s only fifteen miles from here to Coyote Bend!