he is feeling a whole lot stronger these days, that he is getting his second wind, so to speak; that come mid-spring he’ll be as frisky as a colt, and that then he means to have what is his own!  And that is as close as he ever comes to saying anything.  About this one thing, I mean.  He’ll chatter like a magpie about anything else, even his own youthful evil deeds.  He seems to know somehow that no longer has the law any interest in his old carcass, and begins to brag a bit of the wild days up and down the forks of the American and of his own share in it all; half lies and the other half blood-dripping truth, I’d swear.  It makes a man shiver to listen to the old cut-throat.”

“He can’t live a thousand years,” mused King.  “He is eighty now, if he’s a day.”

“Eighty-four by his own estimate.  But when it’s a question of that, he sits there and sucks at his toothless old gums and giggles that it’s the first hundred years that are the hardest to get through with and he’s gettin’ away with ’em.”

“He knows something, Ben.”

“So do we, or think we do.  So does Brodie, it would seem.  Does old Honeycutt know any more than the rest of us?”

“We are all young men compared with Loony Honeycutt, all Johnny-come-lately youngsters.  Gus Ingle and his crowd, as near as we can figure, came to grief in the winter of 1853.  By old Honeycutt’s own count he would have been a wild young devil of seventeen then.  And remember he was one of the roaring crowd that made the country what it was after ’49.  He knows where the old cabin was on Lookout; he swears he knows who built it in that same winter of ’53.  And——­”

“And,” cut in Gaynor, “if you believe the murderous old rascal, he knows with sly, intimate knowledge how and why the man in the lone cabin was killed.  All in that same winter of ’53!”

King pricked up his ears.

“I didn’t know that.  What does he say?”

“He talks on most subjects pretty much at random.  He knows that the sheriff only laughs at him, since who would want to snatch the old derelict away from his mountains after all these years and try to fix a crime of more than half a century ago on him?  But as the law laughs and at least pretends to disbelieve, his pride is hurt.  So he has grown into the way of wild boasting.  You ought to hear him talk about the affair at Murderer’s Bar!  It makes a man shiver to stand there in the sunshine and hear him.  And, with the rest of his drivelling braggadocio, to hear him tell it, hinting broadly it was a boy of seventeen who, carrying nothing but an axe, did for the poor devil in the cabin.”

“And I, for one, believe him!  What is more, I am dead certain—­call it a hunch, if you like—­that if he had had the use of his legs all these years, he’d have gone straight as a string where we are trying to get.”  He began to pace up and down, frowning.  “Brodie has been hanging around him lately, hasn’t he?”