Meanwhile a popular feeling against Tennessee had grown up on the Bar.  He was known to be a gambler; he was suspected to be a thief.  In these suspicions Tennessee’s Partner was equally compromised; his continued intimacy with Tennessee after the affair above quoted could only be accounted for on the hypothesis of a copartnership of crime.  At last Tennessee’s guilt became flagrant.  One day he overtook a stranger on his way to Red Dog.  The stranger afterward related that Tennessee beguiled the time with interesting anecdote and reminiscence, but illogically concluded the interview in the following words:  “And now, young man, I’ll trouble you for your knife, your pistols, and your money.  You see your weppings might get you into trouble at Red Dog, and your money’s a temptation to the evilly disposed.  I think you said your address was San Francisco.  I shall endeavor to call.”  It may be stated here that Tennessee had a fine flow of humor, which no business preoccupation could wholly subdue.

This exploit was his last.  Red Dog and Sandy Bar made common cause against the highwayman.  Tennessee was hunted in very much the same fashion as his prototype, the grizzly.  As the toils closed around him, he made a desperate dash through the Bar, emptying his revolver at the crowd before the Arcade Saloon, and so on up Grizzly Canyon; but at its farther extremity he was stopped by a small man on a gray horse.  The men looked at each other a moment in silence.  Both were fearless, both self-possessed and independent; and both types of a civilization that in the seventeenth century would have been called heroic, but, in the nineteenth, simply “reckless.”  “What have you got there?—­I call,” said Tennessee, quietly.  “Two bowers and an ace,” said the stranger, as quietly, showing two revolvers and a bowie knife.  “That takes me,” returned Tennessee; and with this gamblers’ epigram, he threw away his useless pistol, and rode back with his captor.

It was a warm night.  The cool breeze which usually sprang up with the going down of the sun behind the chaparral-crested mountain was that evening withheld from Sandy Bar.  The little canyon was stifling with heated resinous odors, and the decaying driftwood on the Bar sent forth faint, sickening exhalations.  The feverishness of day, and its fierce passions, still filled the camp.  Lights moved restlessly along the bank of the river, striking no answering reflection from its tawny current.  Against the blackness of the pines the windows of the old loft above the express office stood out staringly bright; and through their curtainless panes the loungers below could see the forms of those who were even then deciding the fate of Tennessee.  And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter passionless stars.