up in was, if anything, worse—­the Gold Coast.  From there I drifted to the Belgian Congo.  I was there for nearly two years doing—­well! perhaps it’s best for me not to enter into details—­we’ll call it ‘rubber.’  It’s a cruel country that—­one that a man doesn’t exactly stay in for his health, anyway; for a bad dose of fever nearly fixed me.  It made me fed up with the climate and—­the life.  So I pulled out of it and went down country to the Transvaal.  That’s how I came to get mixed up in ‘The Raid,’ Inspector.  I was in Jo’burg at the time it was framed up, so I threw in my lot with the rest of you.

“Suddenly I had an overwhelming desire to go back to the States and the range life again.  I was properly fed up with Africa.  So—­back I went there—­to Montana again.  I punched for one or two cow-outfits awhile, and then came a time when a deputation of citizens came and put it up to me if I’d take on the office of Deputy-Sheriff for ——­ County, where I happened to be working.  I suppose the fact of my being a little more handy with a gun than most had impressed some of them.  Things were running wild there just then, and for awhile I tell you, I was up against a rather dirty proposition.  I and my guns certainly worked overtime for a stretch, till I got matters more or less ship-shape.  I had the backing of the best people in the community luckily, and eventually I won out.

“Then—­when the inevitable reaction set in with the peaceable times that followed, somehow I managed to get in bad with some of them.  They had no more use for me or my guns.  I was like a fish out of water.  I decided to pull out, for a strange hankering to see England and my old home again came over me.  So I resigned my office and headed back to the Old Country. . . .”

At this point in his narrative, Gully dropped his head in his hands and rocked wearily awhile ere continuing haltingly:  “It was the mistake of my life—­ever going back—­to a civilized country.  For a time I strove to conduct myself as a law-abiding British citizen—­to conform to the new order of things, but—­I had been amongst the rough stuff too long.  I was out of my sphere entirely.

“One day, in a hotel at Leeds, I got into a violent quarrel with a man—­fellow of the name of Hammond.  It was over a woman.  He insulted me—­in front of a crowd of men at that—­and finally he struck me.  Hitherto I’d taken no back-down from any man living, and I guess I forgot myself then and kind of ran amuck—­fancied I was back in Montana again.  Consequence was—­I threw down on him in front of this crowd and shot him dead.

“Of course I was arrested and charged with murder in the first degree; but as it was adduced at my trial that I’d received a certain amount of provocation, I was sent down for fifteen years.  I’d done little over six months of my time in Barmsworth Prison when I and two of my fellow convicts framed up a scheme to escape.  It takes too long to go into details how we worked it.  I made my get-away, though I had to abolish a poor devil of a warder in doing so.  The other two lost out.  One got shot and the other was caught some days later—­as I read in the papers.