"Moon sort o' roominates on the play, up an' down, for a day or so, makin' out a plan. He don't want to go back himse'f; the agent knows him, an' them Injuns knows him, an' it's even money, if he comes pokin' into their bailiwick, they'll tumble to his errant. In sech events, they're shore doo to corral him an' give them ants another holiday. It's the ant part that gives pore Captain Moon a chill. "'I'll take a chance on a bowie knife,' says Moon to Dan Boggs,-- Dan, bein' a sympathetic gent an' takin' nacherally to folks in trouble, has Moon's confidence from the jump; 'I'll take a chance on a bowie knife; an' as for a gun, I simply courts the resk. But then ants dazzles me--I lay down to ants, an' I looks on it as no disgrace to a gent to say so.' "'Ants shorely do sound poignant,' admits Dan, 'speshully them big black an' red ants that has stingers like hornets an' pinchers like bugs. Sech insecks, armed to the teeth as they be, an' laid out to fight both ways from the middle, is likewise too many for me. I would refoose battle with 'em myse'f.' "It ain't long before Captain Moon an' Curly Ben is seen confidin' an' conferrin' with one another, an' drinkin' by themse'fs, an' no one has to be told that Moon's makin' negotiations with Curly to ride over an' down the agent. The idee is pecooliarly grateful to Wolfville. It stands to win no matter how the kyards lay in the box. If Curly fetches the agent flutterin' from his limb, thar's one miscreant less in Arizona, if the agent gets the drop an' puts out Curly Ben, it comes forth jest the same. It's the camp's theery that, in all that entitles 'em to death, the case stands hoss an' hoss between the agent an' Curly Ben. "'An' if they both gets downed, it's a whip-saw, we win both ways;' says Cherokee Hall, an' the rest of us files away our nose-paint in silent assent tharwith. "It comes out later that Moon agrees to give Curly Ben fifteen hundred dollars an' a pony, if he'll go over an' kill off the agent. Curly Ben says the prop'sition is the pleasantest thing he hears since he leaves the Panhandle ten years before, an' so he accepts five hundred dollars an' the pony--the same bein' the nacher of payments in advance--an' goes clatterin' off up the canyon one evenin' on his mission of jestice. An' then we hears no more of Curly Ben for about a month. No one marvels none at this, however, as downin' any given gent is a prop'sition which in workin' out is likely to involve delays.