He was a little gray-haired hostler, wiper, sweeper, assistant night man in the roundhouse at Big Cloud, anything you like, and this is the story he told me one night, leaning against the blackened jamb of one of the big doors, wiping his hands occasionally upon a hunk of greasy waste.

They were a rough lot out in the mountains in the days when the Hill Division was shaking her steel into something like a permanent right of way—a pretty rough lot. The railroaders because they had to be; the rest because they were just that way naturally. Miners and Indians made up the citizenship mostly, and there’s no worse mixture. They’ve got the redskins corralled on reserves now; but they hadn’t then, and it didn’t take more than one bad word and one drop of bad whisky to set things in lively motion.

There’s a few highfaluting poems, and some other things, about the noble red man that works you up so when you read them that you get to wishing the Almighty had seen fit to let you be a red man, too. Well, that’s all right in its way because, after you’ve rubbed elbows with some of the real thing, you realize that the world owes the poets a living just as much as it does anybody else, and that what they say has to sound good; so you just come to keep the cautionary signals up by instinct, and let it go at that.

But, to give the poets their due, there’s one thing they never trip up on, and that’s the Indian’s compound efficiency for smell. The Indian can smell. When he sticks out his chest, faces southeast, and begins to draw in the God-given mountain air, you’re free to bet that the distilleries down Kentucky way are doing enough business to make regular dividend checks a sure thing. That’s generally good whisky. Bad whisky, in smell and otherwise, carries farther—and it’s only fifteen miles from here to Coyote Bend!

Coyote Bend wasn’t even a pin prick on the engineers’ blue prints when they mapped out the right of way, and there wasn’t any such place when the steel was all spiked down until the day some wandering prospector staked out a bunch of claims—and the news spread.

Gold in the Rockies? No; there’s never been much of it found, but there’s an all-fired big superstition that the mother lode of the whole country is tucked away here somewhere. That’s why, in two days, the wilderness and a gurgling stream that trickled peacefully down through a high-walled canon became Coyote Bend; and that’s why the local freight began to make regular stops to dump off supplies alongside the track. There was no station, of course, no agent, no nothing; the stuff was just dumped, that’s all. The consignees picked out their goods if they could read, or guessed at it if they couldn’t.

Maybe I ought to have told you this before; anyway, I’ll stick it in now. There are three men that figure in this story, though one of them doesn’t count for much. He was a young chap named Charlie Lee. A graduate of an Eastern college he was, and all he had to his name was his diploma and the clothes he stood in when he hit the West. He struck the super for a job, and he got it—braking on the local freight. Hell for a man like him, eh? Well, it was, in more ways than one! Anyway, from that day to this it was the best job he ever held down long enough to draw a second month’s pay check.

The other two were Matt Perley and Faro Clancy—“Breed” Clancy, they called him behind his back.

Perley was a very good sort, pretty straight, pretty clean, measuring by the standards out here in those days; a little bit of a sawed-off, blond-haired, blueeyed man, full of grit inside, and an out-and-out railroad man—only a freight conductor, conductor on the local, but he knew his business; he’d have gone up, ‘way up, in time.

Clancy was a hellion, there’s no other name for him, and even that doesn’t express it—no one word could. Indian one way, Irish the other. He looked mostly Indian; the Irish came out in the brogue. Black, swarthy, small eyes like needle points, coarse dry hair that straggled down over his eyebrows, a hulking bony frame with the strength of a wrecking crane—that’s Clancy, Breed Clancy.

Oh, yes, he was slick, slick as they’re made—with his hands. Faro, stud poker, dice, anything—it was his business; that, and running booze joints. Mining camps and brand-new boom towns were Clancy’s meat mostly—after Perley drove him out of Big Cloud.

Don’t ask me. I don’t know what there was between them. That was before my time. A woman probably—a woman’s generally blamed anyhow. Anyway, one night Perley got the drop on Breed and marched him down the street in front of his pistol and out of the town. After that, Clancy kept away from Big Cloud. As I say, that part was before my time. I only know there was bad blood between them; wicked bad blood on one side, as you’ll see. Clancy disappeared from Big Cloud, and the two didn’t foul each other again until Coyote Bend started.

Breed Clancy hit the Bend with the first inrush of the miners, and before any of them had time to much more than get a pick into the ground he was busy knocking together a bit of a shack he called a hotel, and was ordering the furnishings—liquid furnishings, you understand—from Big Cloud.

There were three barrels of it, the hardest kind of fire water that ever went into the mountains waybilled to Clancy at Coyote Bend by the local, on the first trip that Charlie Lee ever made with Matt Perley. I’m getting back to Lee now, you see.

Well, it was about noon when they whistled for the Bend that day, and Lee, riding the brake wheels on the front end, could see about a dozen “blankets” squatting alongside the right of way about where the train would stop. Grouped behind these were a number of stragglers from the camp, among whom was a big fellow in a red shirt you could see farther than a semaphore arm.

Now, I don’t say those Indians were attracted by the gold rush to Coyote Bend. Coyote Bend, or any other place, old or new, stale or prosperous, would get its share of the redskins. Where they came from or where they went nobody knew. They’d drop in from nowhere, and, if they liked the place, they’d grunt and settle down for a spell; if they didn’t like it, they’d grunt, in benediction or otherwise, and leave.

I’m not saying they smelled the whisky in that train. I’m not saying they knew Clancy was importing fire water, and they were just there to feast their eyes on the barrels and meditate on what was inside. I’m not saying anything at all about that, or what followed. There’s only one man that perhaps might have explained it—-I say “perhaps” because he never did; and also, because he knew Indian nature as well as any white man in the West. That was Perley.

Whether Perley even knew that Clancy was at the Bend or not, I don’t know. I only know that he could have known it if he’d bothered to read the waybills; and it was likewise on the cards that he might have learned the day before, down at Big Cloud, that the whisky was going up the following morning. I don’t know, and that’s straight. Sometimes I think he did; sometimes I think he didn’t. I don’t know.

Anyway, Lee slid to the ground as the train stopped, and went back to the car that held the consignment for the Bend. As he fumbled with the door, he got a whiff of raw spirit that nearly knocked him over. And then, right behind him, rose a chorus of appreciative “ughs!”

I told you an Indian could smell whisky, but I didn’t tell you why. It’s his ruling passion. That’s straight. I’m not judging the Indian; the taste was born in him. There are some white men just as bad. I’m not judging them, either. Some drink for the same reason the Indian does, some for others, and some—some men drink because they have to.

What was I saying? Oh, yes, Lee getting that whiff. Well, before he got the door unfastened, the man in the red shirt had pushed through the Indians and come up beside him.

“Me name’s Clancy,” said he. “Did yez bring up any stuff for me?”

“There’s three barrels for somebody,” replied Lee, and slid open the door—and the next minute he had jumped back with a yell, colliding with Clancy.

“Ugh!” ejaculated the apparition that confronted him.

“He’s drunk! Majestically drunk! An’ on my stuff!” roared Clancy; and then, turning fiercely on Lee: “Fwhat did ye let him in there for, eh? Fwhat did ye let him in for, ye mealy-faced little——”

“Let him in nothing!” retorted Lee, getting back his grip on himself. “Here, you, get out—and quick!”

The Indian blinked gravely, but never moved. He sat cross-legged on the floor, exactly in the middle of the car between the doors, swaying slightly backward and forward. Beside him, up-ended and broached, was one of Clancy’s kegs. The car reeked with the smell of it, for of the half kegful that had gushed out what hadn’t gone into the Indian had gone on to the floor.

The half-breed was raving mad. I’ve a notion sometimes the man wasn’t human at all. He had his hand on Lee’s throat when Perley came running up from the rear end.

“What’s the row?” he began, and then he stopped. He was a cool devil was Perley, and he never turned a hair as he stepped between the two men. “Ah, Clancy, it’s you, is it, you copper-faced renegade?”—no loud talk, no bluster, he didn’t raise his voice; but his insult, the worst he could have laid his tongue to, cut like the sting of a lash.

Clancy swung around like a flash—and stared into the muzzle of the conductor’s.45. His hands were clenching and unclenching as he recognized Perley, and the cords in his neck swelled into knotty lumps.

“Ut’s your worrk, this job, is ut?” he snarled. “Some day, Perley, I’ll show you.”

Queer, you say, he’d act like that—nothing to warrant it. Well, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know what was between them before; but I do know the awful deviltry of Breed Clancy, and I know that Lee, leaning back against the car, shivered at the look that passed between the two of them.

Perley cut the half-breed short off. “Once,” said he contemptuously, still quiet, not a tone raised, and his voice the more deadly for it, “once, perhaps you’ll remember, I warned you to keep out of my road. Lee, how’d that Indian get in the car?”

“I don’t know,” said Lee.

“Well, then, throw him out,” said Perley shortly, snapping his watch with his free hand. “We can’t stay here all day.”

This little ruction between Perley and the half-breed has taken me longer to tell it, I guess, than it did to happen. Anyway, it didn’t cause the excitement you might think it would. The “blankets” were too busy drinking in the smell of that whisky to let their hungry eyes wander very far from anywhere but the open door of that car. And as for the stragglers, by the time they’d caught on to the fact that there was something on the boards besides that drunken Indian, Perley, with the same cool contempt, had slipped his gun back in his pocket and was boosting Lee into the car.

The Indian offered no opposition as Lee tackled him. He couldn’t—he was beyond all that—he was so full of dead-eye it was oozing out by the pores. He just sat there, and Lee slid him to the door just as he was, still sitting, and dropped him out. He struck the ground with a thud, rebounded a foot, rolled over, grunted, and lay like a log. There was a guffaw from the camp stragglers, and a deep and envious chorus of “Ughs!” from the “blankets.”

No, I’m not joking—it’s a long way from a joke, as you’ll see. They were envious. It acted like a red rag on a bull—the possibility of attaining the condition, the state of heavenly bliss, that had been reached by their red brother, do you understand?

Clancy wasn’t laughing. He stood where Perley had left him, sullen and with twitching face. I don’t know, I think it was Perley’s sheer nerve that kept the halfbreed from drawing and shooting the conductor when his back was turned. I don’t know—brute beast cowed by the human mind, perhaps. No one ever knew Breed Clancy. He had his yellow streak at times, and then again the blood that was in him made him worse than a frenzied madman. Yes, I guess it was a case of “brute” all right, for there was no cowing him when the frenzy was on him.

Perley wasn’t laughing, either. He was opening and shutting his watch impatiently. “Come on! Come on!” he cried at Lee. “Get those barrels out. We’ve got to cross Number Two at the Creek. It’ll be the carpet for ours if we hold her up.”

Lee grabbed the broached cask and edged it toward the doorway. The contents slopped and sloshed inside as he moved it, and occasionally a little of the stuff would spill out through the bunghole. Then, somehow, just as he got it to the door, his hold slipped, out it went, bounded on the edge of the ties, and then went down the embankment right into the hands of those squatting “blankets.” They didn’t squat long; I don’t need to tell you that. They were on it in a mob, and they got the taste—they’d had the smell—and the fill was to come presently.

Clancy was cursing in streams; and no fouler-mouthed man than Clancy ever lived. He tried once to get the Indians off the barrel, and the stragglers backed him up half-heartedly. You might as well have tried to move that mogul on the pit there behind you. He didn’t try but once, then he fell back on cursing again, and Perley was the target for most of it.

Perley? He never answered him, but his face grew harder and harder—and his gun was in his hand again. “Throw out those other two barrels!” he snapped at Lee.

“The redskins will get every last drop if I do,” objected Lee, hesitating.

“Owner’s risk. We’ve no station here. Throw ‘em out!” repeated Perley, grimmer than before, only this time loud enough for Clancy to hear him.

“Ye do,” roared the half-breed, &ldq............