Something in the man’s manner, as in a certain sly amusement the other passengers appeared to extract from the conversation, impressed Hale, already beginning to be conscious of the ludicrous insufficiency of his own grievance beside that of his interlocutor.

“Then you mean to say this thing is inevitable,” said he bitterly, but less aggressively.

“Ez long ez they hunt you; when you hunt them you’ve got the advantage, allus provided you know how to get at them ez well as they know how to get at you.  This yer coach is bound to go regular, and on certain days.  They ain’t.  By the time the sheriff gets out his posse they’ve skedaddled, and the leader, like as not, is takin’ his quiet cocktail at the Bank Exchange, or mebbe losin’ his earnings to the sheriff over draw poker, in Sacramento.  You see you can’t prove anything agin them unless you take them ‘on the fly.’  It may be a part of Joaquim Murietta’s band, though I wouldn’t swear to it.”

“The leader might have been Gentleman George, from up-country,” interposed a passenger.  “He seemed to throw in a few fancy touches, particlerly in that ‘Good night.’  Sorter chucked a little sentiment in it.  Didn’t seem to be the same thing ez, ‘Git, yer d—­d suckers,’ on the other line.”

“Whoever he was, he knew the road and the men who travelled on it.  Like ez not, he went over the line beside the driver on the box on the down trip, and took stock of everything.  He even knew I had those greenbacks; though they were handed to me in the bank at Sacramento.  He must have been hanging ’round there.”

For some moments Hale remained silent.  He was a civic-bred man, with an intense love of law and order; the kind of man who is the first to take that law and order into his own hands when he does not find it existing to please him.  He had a Bostonian’s respect for respectability, tradition, and propriety, but was willing to face irregularity and impropriety to create order elsewhere.  He was fond of Nature with these limitations, never quite trusting her unguided instincts, and finding her as an instructress greatly inferior to Harvard University, though possibly not to Cornell.  With dauntless enterprise and energy he had built and stocked a charming cottage farm in a nook in the Sierras, whence he opposed, like the lesser Englishman that he was, his own tastes to those of the alien West.  In the present instance he felt it incumbent upon him not only to assert his principles, but to act upon them with his usual energy.  How far he was impelled by the half-contemptuous passiveness of his companions it would be difficult to say.

“What is to prevent the pursuit of them at once?” he asked suddenly.  “We are a few miles from the station, where horses can be procured.”

“Who’s to do it?” replied the other lazily.  “The stage company will lodge the complaint with the authorities, but it will take two days to get the county officers out, and it’s nobody else’s funeral.”