“Perry gang wiped out, I hear, Major,” said he “Good thing for the country.  That’s a lesson the ‘toughs’ in these parts won’t forget for a long time.  Plucky girl that give ’em away, wasn’t she.  Hope she’s all right.”

“She is all right,” said Sinclair, with a smile.

“Glad of that.  By-the-way, that father of her’n passed in his checks to-night.  He’d got one warning from the Vigilantes, and yesterday they found out he was in with this gang, and they was a-going for him; but when the telegram come, he put a pistol to his head and saved them all trouble.  Good riddance to everybody, I say.  The sheriff’s here now, and is going east on the next train to get them fellows.  He’s got a big posse together, and I wouldn’t wonder if they was hard to hold in, after the ‘boys in blue’ is gone.”

In a few minutes the train was off, with its living freight—­the just and the unjust, the reformed and the rescued, the happy and the anxious.  With many of the passengers the episode of the night was already a thing of the past.  Sinclair sat by the side of his wife, to whose cheeks the color had all come back; and Sally Johnson lay in her berth, faint still, but able to give an occasional smile to Foster.  In the station on the Missouri the reporters were gathered about the happy superintendent, smoking his cigars, and filling their note-books with items.  In Denver, their brethren would gladly have done the same, but Watkins failed to gratify them.  He was a man of few words.  When the train had gone, and a friend remarked: 

“Hope they’ll get through all right, now,” he simply said: 

“Yes, likely.  Two shots don’t ’most always go in the same hole.”  Then he went to the telegraph instrument.  In a few minutes he could have told a story as wild as a Norse saga, but what he said, when Denver had responded, was only—­

"No. 17, fifty-five minutes late."

THE MISFORTUNES OF BRO’ THOMAS WHEATLEY.

By LINA REDWOOD FAIRFAX.

He is our office-boy and messenger, and, my senior tells me, has been employed by the firm in this capacity for about thirty years.  He is a negro, about sixty years old, rather short and stout, with a mincing, noiseless gait, broad African features, beautiful teeth, and small, round, twinkling eyes, the movements of which are accompanied by little abrupt, sidewise turns of the head, like a bird.  His manner is a curious mixture of deference and self-importance, his voice a soft, sibilant whisper, and as he was born and bred in Alexandria, Virginia, it seems almost superfluous to add that he and the letter “r” are not on speaking terms.