A belated sense of caution caused him to sweep the room with his eyes to see if any one had observed his ill-concealed alarm. A sigh of relief forced itself to his lips as he saw that Escondido, the Basque proprietor, was his only companion. Vin was hunched over the bar, his head resting in his arms, sound asleep. A rear door led to the wool platform. The man tiptoed to it quickly, and without a backward glance passed outside. A second later the stranger was shaking Vin back to consciousness. “I want a room, _muchacho_” he said with some impatience. Vin blinked his eyes. “No room, _señor_. Theese hotel is feel up. Plenty men in town.” “I’m not stayin’ all night. It’s goin’ to rain. I’ll go on after the stormin’s done. You let me have one of the boys’ rooms. They won’t be turnin’ in till late. I’m dead tired.” “Sure, Mike! I guess we feex leetla theeng like that. You take the end room. I call you nine o’clock.” The Basque turned to fish out from a pile of soiled papers a dilapidated book which served the place as a register. “You put your name in theese book, _señor_.” He held it toward the man, pencil in his free hand. The stranger’s eyes held Vin’s as he took the book and pencil; but instead of writing as requested, he closed the book and put the pencil on top of it, after which he placed them with extravagant care on the polished bar. Vin started to protest, but the man’s squinting, smiling gray eyes made him pause. Damn these gringoes when they smile! “No,” the stranger was saying. “_Niente, señor._ I’ve just clean fergot how to write. You understand?” “_Sí, sí._” Escondido was not lying. He understood the _eyes_. It was sufficient. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders and a grin: “Me, I pretty dam’ well ferget how to read somethings, too.” “_Señor_, you are a man of wisdom.” A few minutes later, having removed his boots and draped his gun belt and hat over a convenient chair, the man was asleep. Neither the noise from the platform nor the heavy smell of creosote drifting in through the open window disturbed him. He had been in the saddle twelve hours that day. The freshening wind and the gathering clouds to the north bore unmistakable promise of approaching storm. This would have caused him no concern. He had foreseen it and molded his plans to its whim. A conversation going on in a cabin across the tracks would have been of infinitely more interest. He was the subject of that talk; one of the two thus engaged being the man who had stolen out of the Palace bar. “I tell you it’s him,” he repeated doggedly from time to time. “Ain’t no ghosts scarin’ me thataway. It’s Crosbie Traynor.” “And him dead these twenty years?”