He went to Carson and sat down in a saloon to wait for the stage—­it would leave at four in the morning.  But as the night waned and the crowd thinned, he grew uneasy, and told the bar-keeper that assassins were on his track.  The bar-keeper told him to stay in the middle of the room, then, and not go near the door, or the window by the stove.  But a fatal fascination seduced him to the neighborhood of the stove every now and then, and repeatedly the bar-keeper brought him back to the middle of the room and warned him to remain there.  But he could not.  At three in the morning he again returned to the stove and sat down by a stranger.  Before the bar-keeper could get to him with another warning whisper, some one outside fired through the window and riddled McGee’s breast with slugs, killing him almost instantly.  By the same discharge the stranger at McGee’s side also received attentions which proved fatal in the course of two or three days.

CHAPTER L.

These murder and jury statistics remind me of a certain very extraordinary trial and execution of twenty years ago; it is a scrap of history familiar to all old Californians, and worthy to be known by other peoples of the earth that love simple, straightforward justice unencumbered with nonsense.  I would apologize for this digression but for the fact that the information I am about to offer is apology enough in itself.  And since I digress constantly anyhow, perhaps it is as well to eschew apologies altogether and thus prevent their growing irksome.

Capt.  Ned Blakely—­that name will answer as well as any other fictitious one (for he was still with the living at last accounts, and may not desire to be famous)—­sailed ships out of the harbor of San Francisco for many years.  He was a stalwart, warm-hearted, eagle-eyed veteran, who had been a sailor nearly fifty years—­a sailor from early boyhood.  He was a rough, honest creature, full of pluck, and just as full of hard-headed simplicity, too.  He hated trifling conventionalities—­“business” was the word, with him.  He had all a sailor’s vindictiveness against the quips and quirks of the law, and steadfastly believed that the first and last aim and object of the law and lawyers was to defeat justice.

He sailed for the Chincha Islands in command of a guano ship.  He had a fine crew, but his negro mate was his pet—­on him he had for years lavished his admiration and esteem.  It was Capt.  Ned’s first voyage to the Chinchas, but his fame had gone before him—­the fame of being a man who would fight at the dropping of a handkerchief, when imposed upon, and would stand no nonsense.  It was a fame well earned.  Arrived in the islands, he found that the staple of conversation was the exploits of one Bill Noakes, a bully, the mate of a trading ship.  This man had created a small reign of terror there.  At nine o’clock at night, Capt.  Ned, all alone, was pacing his deck in the starlight.  A form ascended the side, and approached him.  Capt.  Ned said: