Blascom chuckled and shrugged his shoulders. "Yore little game with Whiskey Jim an’ your soiree with Jake tell me different," he answered. "I’ve rubbed elbows with all sorts of men for forty-odd years--ever since I was a boy of sixteen. A man’s got to back his best judgment: an’ I’m backin’ mine. If I wasn’t shore about you do you reckon I’d be tellin’ you anythin’ about that sump? Now then: what you say about settin’ here an’ takin’ things easy for th’ rest of th’ day? I don’t want you to get all mucked up." Tex arose, took the boxes of .38 shorts out of his pockets and lay them on a shelf. He put the heavy little sacks in their places and turned. "It’ll do me good; an’ I might learn somethin’ useful," he said. "A man can’t never learn too much. Come on; we’ll tackle that sump." As he changed his clothes for those of his host the latter’s words of confidence in him set him thinking. To his mind came scenes of long ago. "Deacon" Rankin, "Slippery" Trendley, "Slim" Travennes, and others of that savage, murderous, vulture class returned on his mental canvas. Of the worst class in the great West they had stood in the first rank; and at one time he had stood with them, shoulder to shoulder, had deliberately chosen them for his friends and companions, and in many of their villainies he had played his minor parts. He stirred into renewed activity and dressed rapidly. Changing the gold sacks into the clothes he now wore and putting on his host’s extra pair of boots, he stepped toward the door and then thought of Jake, who reminded him somewhat of his former friends, lacking only their intelligence. He turned and swept up his gun and belt, buckling it around him as he left the shack to help his new friend. *CHAPTER VIII* *AFTER DARK* Murphy’s blocked-up box car was dark and showed no signs of life, making only a blacker spot in the night. To any prowler who might have investigated its externals, the raised shades and the closed door would have left him undecided as to whether or not its tenant was within; but the closed windows on such a night as this would have suggested that he was not, for the baked earth radiated heat and the walls of the modest habitation were still warm to the touch. Inside the closed car the heat must have been well-nigh intolerable.