“Several things, else I should not be here now,” rejoined Jim, with an inner thrill of elation over the success of his half-random shot. “Suppose you go on with your story, and then I shall know more.” The other sighed deeply, and proceeded: “Since you know so much, sir, there is no sense in my hiding anything. Not that I think I should have hidden anything, in any case. As I told you, I am an old man, and all this has been hard to bear. But you don’t want me to tell about my feelings, sir; you want the story. “When Kitty had been gone a year or more, and Marita was about seventeen, Nicholas Blankley came to the town where we lived. It was a little Arizona settlement, where I ran a saloon and gambling place. Blankley was one of us—I mean he was a natural-born crook, but he wasn’t a bad sort of fellow at that, if you know what I mean, sir. He was a good sport, and square with his pals, which is more than can be said for most of us! He was in the theatrical line, and had worked on all sorts of jobs of that kind—advance man, stage manager, all sorts of things. He was interested in Rita from the first—saw her possibilities as a ‘cowgirl,’ and was fond of her, too—for she was young and fresh in those days, and the daring, reckless sort that got men. Nick got the daredevil name from her; that’s what he used to call her. “His idea was to start a sort of wild-West show, on the cheap; get some down-and-outers who could ride and shoot and who wouldn’t want much pay, and do short jumps at low prices. We would have to carry the horses, but no scenery, and no props to speak of, and we could use a big tent like the small circus people. It looked like a good venture, and I was tired of staying in one place. Marita was wild about it from the first. So I sold out my business, and we started. We made a success of it, though nothing very big, and kept at it fifteen years! Fifteen years! It seems impossible that it could have been as long as that, but it was. In that time Marita married Nick, and we ran across Alan Morton—I might as well go on calling him Mortimer, though. “There’s no use pretending that we were running our outfit strictly on the straight. We weren’t. We were out to get what we could out of the public, and we didn’t care much how we did it. But we didn’t do anything very bad; I, for one, was getting careful as time went on, and Nick had a notion of reforming after he married Rita. We did run a gambling business in connection with the show, and we did cheat a bit, and we did take in any sort of thug or gunman or escaped convict who had ever learned to ride, and Nick got away with a very good thing in phony change at one place. Very neat, indeed, it was, and he never had any trouble with it, either.” Wrenn spoke of this with a sort of pride which made Barrison shake his head again. He was the queerest felon with whom the detective had ever come in contact.