“Dave, was you ever treed by wild hogs?  That’s how them two people kept after me.  You’d have thought I’d deprived ’em of their young.  I didn’t want to hurt ’em, but whenever I’d run they’d tangle my legs.  By and by I got so short of breath that I couldn’t run, so I fell on top of the man.  But the woman got me by the legs and rolled me under.  I busted out and hoofed it again, but they caught me and down we went, me on top.  Then that man’s helpmate grabbed my legs and rolled me over, like she did before.  Finally I got too tired to do anything but paw like a puppy.  It seems like we must have fought that way all the morning, Dave.  Anyhow, people gathered from long distances and cheered the woman.  I got desperate toward the last, and I unraveled the right hip of my bathing suit grabbing for my gun.  I couldn’t see the bath-house for the sand in my eyes, so I must have led ’em up across the boulevard and into the tent colony, for after a while we were rolling around among tent-pegs and tangling up in guy-ropes, and all the time our audience was growing.  Dave, those tent-ropes sounded like guitar strings.”

Blaze paused to wipe the sweat from his brow, whereupon his listener inquired in a choking voice: 

“How did you come out?”

“I reckon I’d have got shed of ’em somehow, for I was resting up on top of my man, but that stinging lizard of a woman got her claws into the neck of my bathing-suit and r’ared back on it.  Dave, she skinned me out of that garment the way you’d skin out an eel, and—­there I was!  You never heard such a yelling as went up.  And I didn’t hear all of it, either, for I just laid back my ears and went through those sight-seers like a jack-rabbit.  I never knew a man could run like I did.  I could hear people holler, ’Here he comes,’ ‘There he goes,’ ‘Yonder he went,’ but I was never headed.  I hurdled the sea-wall like an antelope, and before they got eyes on me I was into my bath-house.

“When I’d got dressed, I sneaked up to the Galvez for a drink.  In the bar were a lot of stockmen, and they asked me where I’d been.  I told ’em I’d been nursing a sick lodge member, and they said: 

“’Too bad!  You missed the damnedest fight since Custer was licked.  We couldn’t get very close, for the jam, but it was great!’

“The story went all over Galveston.  The husband swore he’d kill the man who attacked his wife, and the newspapers called on the police to discover the ruffian.”

There was a protracted silence; then Law controlled his voice sufficiently to say:  “It’s fortunate he didn’t recognize you to-night.”

“Maybe he did.  Anyhow, his wife is the new dressmaker Paloma’s hired.  I ’ain’t got a chance, Dave.  That story will ruin me in the community, and Paloma will turn me out when she learns I’m a—­a lady-pincher.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Blaze sighed.  “I don’t know, yet.  Probably I’ll end by running from those scorpions, like I did before.”