"Reckon them Injuns won’t git so fur north as here," suggested Carter hopefully, and harking back to the subject which lay heaviest on his mind. "They ’ve only been here twict in ten years." "Which was twice too often," asserted Lefty. "Th’ last time they was here," remarked Dad, reminiscently, "they didn’t stop long; though where they went to I dunno. We gave ’em more ’n they could handle. That was th’ time I just bought that new Sharps rifle, an’ what I done with that gun was turrible." He paused to gather the facts in the right order before he told the story, and when he looked around again he flushed and swore. The audience had silently faded away to escape the moth-eaten story they knew by heart. The fact that Dad usually improved it and his part in it, each time he told it, did not lure them. "Cussed ingrates!" he swore, turning to Bill. "They ’re plumb jealous!" "They act like it, anyhow," agreed Bill soberly. "I ’d like to hear it, but I ’m too thirsty. Come in an’ have one with me?" The story was indefinitely postponed. An accordion wheezed down the street and a mouth-organ tried desperately to join in from the saloon next door, but, owing to a great difference in memory, did not harmonize. A roar of laughter from Dawson’s, and the loud clink of glasses told where Dad’s would-have-been audience then was. Carter walked around his counter and seated himself in his favorite place against the door jamb. Bill, having eluded Dad, sat on a keg of edibles and smoked in silence and content, occasionally slapping at the flies which buzzed persistently around his head. Knocking the ashes from the cigarette he leaned back lazily and looked at Carter. "Wonder where he is?" he muttered. "Huh?" grunted the proprietor, glancing around. "Oh, you worryin’ about that yearlin’? Well, you needn’t! Nothin’ never sidetracks Jimmy." A fusillade of shots made Bill stand up, and Carter leaped to his feet and dashed toward the counter. But he paused and looked around foolishly. "That’s his yell," he explained. "Didn’t I tell you? He’s arrove, same as usual." The drumming of hoofs came rapidly nearer and heads popped out of windows and doors, each head flanked by a rifle barrel. Above a swirling cloud of dust glinted a spurting Colt and thrust through the smudge was a hand waving a strange collection of articles. "Hullo, Kid!" shouted Dawson. "What you got? See any Injuns?" "It’s a G-string an’ a medicine-bag, by all that’s holy!" cried Dad from the harness shop. "Where ’d you git ’em, Jimmy?" Jimmy drew rein and slid to a stand, pricking his nettlesome "Calico" until it pranced to suit him. Waving the Apache breech-cloth, the medicine-bag and a stocking-shaped moccasin in one hand, he proudly held up an old, dirty, battered Winchester repeater in the other and whooped a war-cry.