As the mills of the gods ground on, Pete Monat, with his bandaged head, and Mike Slattery, still nursing his battered jaw, were removed from the bridal chamber, tried, and lodged in the tanks for safety. Pete had hired a shyster lawyer and got ten years in Yuma; Mike had plead his own case and escaped with only three. It was this last lesson that Pecos conned in his heart. When Slattery the yegg was arrested he had feigned an overpowering drunkenness, and though the case was all against him—he had been caught in the act of burglarizing a lodging-house and was loaded down with loot—he had nevertheless framed up a good defence. With the artless innocence of the skilled "moocher" he explained to the court that while under the influence of no less than seven drinks of straight alcohol he had mistaken another gentleman's room for his own and had gathered up his wardrobe under the misapprehension that it was his own. At every attempt to prove his culpability he had represented that, beyond the main facts, his mind was a complete blank, at the same time giving such a witty description of the paralyzing effects of "Alki" that even the district attorney had laughed. According to Mike that was the way to get off easy, be polite and respectful-like to the judge and jury and jolly up the prosecuting attorney—and in this contention the unfortunate experience of Pete Monat clearly bore him out. Pete had made the fatal mistake of hiring, with two months' back pay, a "sucking lawyer" who had so antagonized the district attorney that that gentleman had become enraged, making such a red-hot speech against the damnable practice of horse-stealing—"a crime, gentlemen of the jury, which, because it may leave the innocent owner of that horse to die of thirst on the desert, ought by rights to be made a capital offence"—that poor Pete was found guilty and sentenced before he could build up a new defence.