And he did bother Ben again, late that fall.  When the circus closed he travelled back a thousand miles in a check suit and a red necktie, just to get another good licking.  Ben must of been quite aggravated by that time, for he wound up by throwing Ed into the crick in all his proud clothes.

Ed was just as honest about it as before.  He says Ben licked him fair.  But it hadn’t changed his mind.  He felt that Ben’s report had knocked his just celebrity and he was still hostile.

“Mebbe you can’t lick Ben,” I says to him again.  “I can keep on doing my endeavours,” he says.  “I had to come off in a friend of mine’s coat because my own was practically destroyed; but I’ll be back again before Ben has clumb very high on that ladder of his career.”

The adventurer was interned at my house for ten days, till his bruises lost their purple glow and he looked a little less like a bad case of erysipelas.  Then he started out again, crazy as a loon!  I didn’t hear from him for nearly two years.  Then I got a letter telling about his life of adventure down on the Border.  It seems he’d got in with a good capable stockman down there and they was engaged in the cattle business.  The business was to go over into Mexico, attracting as little notice as possible, cut out a bunch of cattle, and drive ’em across into the land of the free.  Naturally what they sold for was clear profit.

Ed said he was out for adventure and this had a-plenty.  He said I wouldn’t believe how exciting it could be at times.  He wanted to know what Ben was promoted to by this time, and was he looking as hearty as ever?  Some day he was coming back and force Ben to set him right before the world.

About a year later he writes that the cattle business is getting too tame.  He’s done it so much that all the excitement has gone.  He says I wouldn’t believe how tame it can be, with hardly any risk of getting shot.  He says he wouldn’t keep on running off these Mexican cattle if it wasn’t for the money in it; and, furthermore, it sometimes seems to him when he’s riding along in the beautiful still night, with only God’s stars for companions, that there’s something about it that ain’t right.

But it’s another year before he writes that he has disposed of his stock interests and is coming North to lick Ben proper.  He does come North.  He was correct to that extent.  He outfitted at the Chicago Store in Tucson, getting the best all-wool ready-made suit in Arizona, with fine fruit and flower and vegetable effects, shading from mustard yellow to beet colour; and patent-leather ties, with plaid socks—­and so on.  He stopped off at Red Gap on his way up to do this outrage.  His face was baked a rich red brown; so I saw it wouldn’t show up marks as legibly as when he was pale.

He said Ben wasn’t a right bad fellow and he had no personal grudge against him, except he needed to have his head beat off on account of his inhumanity.