Without removing his elbows from the bar, Cinnabar Joe nodded toward the door:  “You git to hell out o’ here!” he said, quietly.  “I don’t set in no game with you, see?  I don’t want none o’ your chips.  Of all the God-damned low-lived——­”

“If I was you,” broke in the cowpuncher with a meaning look, “I’d choke off ’fore I’d got in too fer to back out.”  Something in the glint of the black eyes caused the bartender to pause.  Purdy laughed, tossed the butt of his cigarette to the floor, and began irrelevantly:  “It’s hell—­jest hell with the knots an’ bark left on—­that Nevada wild horse range is.”  The cowpuncher noted that Cinnabar Joe ceased suddenly to puff his cigar.  “It’s about seven year, mebbe it’s eight,” he continued, “that an outfit got the idee that mebbe Pete Barnum had the wild horse business to hisself long enough.  Four of ’em was pretty rough hands, an’ the Kid was headed that way.

“Them that was there knows a heap more’n what I do about what they went through ‘fore they got out o’ the desert where water-holes was about as common as good Injuns.  Anyways, this outfit didn’t git no wild horses.  They was good an’ damn glad to git out with what horses they’d took in, an’ a whole hide.  They’d blow’d in all they had on their projec’ an’ they was broke when they headed fer Idaho.”  The bartender’s cigar had gone out and the cowpuncher saw that his face was a shade paler.  “Then a train stopped sudden one evenin’ where they wasn’t no station, an’ after that the outfit busted up.  But they wasn’t broke no more, all but the Kid.  They left him shift fer hisself.  Couple o’ years later two of the outfit drifted together in Cinnabar an’ there they found the Kid drivin’ a dude-wagon.  Drivin’ a dude-wagon through the park is a damn sight easier than huntin’ wild horses, an’ a damn sight safer than railroadin’ with a Colt, so when the two hard hands stops the Kid’s dude-wagon in the park, thinkin’ they’d have a cinch goin’ through the Kid’s passengers, they got fooled good an’ proper when the Kid pumps ’em full of .45 pills.  After that the Kid come to be know’d as Cinnabar Joe, an’ when the last of the dude-wagons was throw’d out fer automobiles the Kid drifted up into the cow country.  But they’s a certain express company that’s still huntin’ fer the gang—­not knowin’ o’ course that the Cinnabar Joe that got notorious fer defendin’ his dudes was one of ’em.’”

The cowpuncher ceased speaking and produced his “makings” while the other stood gazing straight before him, the dead cigar still gripped in the corner of his mouth.  The scratch of the match roused him and quick as a flash he reached beneath the bar and the next instant had Purdy covered with a six-shooter.  With his finger on the trigger Cinnabar Joe hesitated, and in that instant he learned that the man that faced him across the bar was as brave as he was unscrupulous.  The fingers that twisted the little cylinder of paper never faltered and the black eyes looked straight into the muzzle of the gun.