He drew back carefully into the shadow of the partition as one of the voices asked-- “Wasn't that Johnson just come in?” There was a movement as if some one had risen to look over the compartment, but the gathering twilight completely hid Ezekiel. “No!” “He's late. Suppose he don't come--or back out?” The other man broke into a grim laugh. “I reckon you don't know Johnson yet, or you'd understand this yer little game o' his is just the one idea o' his life. He's been two years on that man's track, and he ain't goin' to back out now that he's got a dead sure thing on him.” “But why is he so keen about it, anyway? It don't seem nat'ral for a business man built after Johnson's style, and a rich man to boot, to go into this detective business. It ain't the reward, we know that. Is it an old grudge?” “You bet!” The speaker paused, and then in a lower voice, which taxed Ezekial's keen ear to the uttermost, resumed: “It's said up in Frisco that Cherokee Bob knew suthin' agin Johnson way back in the States; anyhow, I believe it's understood that they came across the plains together in '50--and Bob hounded Johnson and blackmailed him here where he was livin', even to the point of makin' him help him on the road or give information, until one day Johnson bucked against it--kicked over the traces--and swore he'd be revenged on Bob, and then just settled himself down to that business. Wotever he'd been and done himself he made it all right with the sheriff here; and I've heard ez it wasn't anything criminal or that sort, but that it was o' some private trouble that he'd confided to that hound Bob, and Bob had threatened to tell agen him. That's the grudge they say Johnson has, and that's why he's allowed to be the head devil in this yer affair. It's an understood thing, too, that the sheriff and the police ain't goin' to interfere if Johnson accidentally blows the top of Bob's head off in the scrimmage of a capter.” “And I reckon Bob wouldn't hesitate to do the same thing to him when he finds out that Johnson has given him away?” “I reckon,” said the other, sententiously, “for it's Johnson's knowledge of the country and the hoss-stealers that are in with Bob's gang of road agents that made it easy for him to buy up and win over Bob's friends here, so that they'd help to trap him.” “It's pretty rough on Bob to be sold out in that way,” said the second speaker, sympathizingly. “If they were white men, p'rhaps,” returned his companion, contemptuously, “but this yer's a case of Injin agen Injin, ez the men are Mexican half-breeds just as Bob's a half Cherokee. The sooner that kind o' cross cattle exterminate each other the better it'll be for the country. It takes a white man like Johnson to set 'em by the ears.” A silence followed. Ezekiel, beginning to be slightly bored with his cheaply acquired but rather impractical information, was about to slip back into the passage again when he was arrested by a laugh from the first speaker.