Coyote Bend wasn’t even a pin prick on the engineers’ blue prints when they mapped out the right of way, and there wasn’t any such place when the steel was all spiked down until the day some wandering prospector staked out a bunch of claims--and the news spread. Gold in the Rockies? No; there’s never been much of it _found_, but there’s an all-fired big superstition that the mother lode of the whole country is tucked away here somewhere. That’s why, in two days, the wilderness and a gurgling stream that trickled peacefully down through a high-walled canon became Coyote Bend; and that’s why the local freight began to make regular stops to dump off supplies alongside the track. There was no station, of course, no agent, no nothing; the stuff was just dumped, that’s all. The consignees picked out their goods if they could read, or guessed at it if they couldn’t. Maybe I ought to have told you this before; anyway, I’ll stick it in now. There are three men that figure in this story, though one of them doesn’t count for much. He was a young chap named Charlie Lee. A graduate of an Eastern college he was, and all he had to his name was his diploma and the clothes he stood in when he hit the West. He struck the super for a job, and he got it--braking on the local freight. Hell for a man like him, eh? Well, it was, in more ways than one! Anyway, from that day to this it was the best job he ever held down long enough to draw a second month’s pay check. The other two were Matt Perley and Faro Clancy--“Breed” Clancy, they called him behind his back. Perley was a very good sort, pretty straight, pretty clean, measuring by the standards out here in those days; a little bit of a sawed-off, blond-haired, blueeyed man, full of grit inside, and an out-and-out railroad man--only a freight conductor, conductor on the local, but he knew his business; he’d have gone up, ‘way up, in time. Clancy was a hellion, there’s no other name for him, and even that doesn’t express it--no one word could. Indian one way, Irish the other. He looked mostly Indian; the Irish came out in the brogue. Black, swarthy, small eyes like needle points, coarse dry hair that straggled down over his eyebrows, a hulking bony frame with the strength of a wrecking crane--that’s Clancy, Breed Clancy. Oh, yes, he was slick, slick as they’re made--with his hands. Faro, stud poker, dice, anything--it was his business; that, and running booze joints. Mining camps and brand-new boom towns were Clancy’s meat mostly--after Perley drove him out of Big Cloud.