Bakersfield; he pays good money for good stuff-- an' he asks no questions. I happened to hear he was a-comin' down only las' Sunday."

Something in his voice, some sly gleam in his eye, aroused my suspicions. As soon as we happened to be alone, I whispered to my brother: "I say, what if the old man is playing hare and hound with us?"

"Pooh!" said Ajax. "He's keen as mustard to collar this thief--the keener, possibly, since he discovered that the fellow is a tenderfoot. I've sized him up about right. He wants to establish a record. It's like this teetotal business of his. The people here refuse to believe evil of a man who drinks water, goes to church, and catches horse- thieves. I'll add one word more. To give the old fraud his due, he really holds in abhorrence any crime that might land him in the State penitentiary. Hullo! There's a faint reek out yonder. I'll take a squint through my glasses."

We called a halt. We were now on the alkaline plains beyond the San Emigdio mountains. Riding all through the night, we had changed horses at a ranch where we were known. Ajax stared through his binoculars.

"What we're after," said he quietly, "is in sight."

He handed his glasses to me. I could barely make out a horseman, herding along two animals. The plains were blazing with heat. In the distance a soft blue haze obscured the horizon; faintly outlined against this were three spirals of what seemed to be white smoke: three moving pillars of alkaline dust.

"He can't git away from us," said old man Dumble.

Looking at him, my suspicions took flight. He was, as Ajax said, keener than we to arrest the thief. His small eyes sparkled with excitement; his right index-finger was crooked, as if itching for the trigger; his lips moved. In fancy he was rehearsing the "Stand and deliver" of an officer of the law!

"We kin ride him down," he muttered.

"Yes," said Ajax.

We looked to our girths and our pistols. It was unlikely that the thief would show fight, but--he might. Then we mounted, and galloped ahead.

"Forrard--for-r-rard!" shouted Ajax.

Within a few minutes, a quarter of an hour at most, the man we were hunting would see us; then the chase would really begin. He would abandon the footsore colts, and make for the hills. And so it came to pass. Presently, we saw the horseman turn off at right angles; the jaded colts hesitated, trotted a few yards, and stood still. A faint neigh floated down wind.

"Doggone it!" exclaimed old man Dumble, "his horse is fresh. He's got friends in the hills."

We had left the trail, and were pounding over the sage-brush desert. I could smell the sage, strongly pungent, and the alkaline dust began to irritate my throat; the sun, if one stood still, was strong enough to blister the skin of the hands.

For three-quarters of an hour it seemed to me that the distance between us and our quarry remained constant; but Dumble said we were falling behind. The thief was lighter than any of us, and his horse was evidently a stayer. The hills rose out of the haze, bleak and bare, seamed with gulches, a safe sanctuary for all wild things.

"If the cuss was within range, I'd try a shot," said the old man.

"I'd like to make out who he is," said Ajax.

Suddenly the horse of the thief fell. We discovered later that the beast had plunged into a piece of ground honeycombed with squirrel- holes. The man staggered to his feet; the horse struggled where he fell, but did not rise. His shoulder was broken.

"We have him!" yelled Dumble.

"Yes; we have him," repeated my brother. "Suppose we take a look at him?"

The thief had abandoned all idea of escape. He stood beside his horse, waiting for us; but at the distance we could not determine whether he intended to surrender quietly or to fight. Ajax adjusted his glasses, and glanced through them. Then, with an exclamation, he handed them to me.

"Kin ye make him out, boys?" asked our neighbour.

"Yes," said I, giving back the glasses to Ajax. He handed them in silence to old man Dumble. Then, instinctively, both our right hands went to our belts. We were not quite sure what a father might do.

He did what should have been expected--and avoided. He dropped the binoculars. Then he turned to us, trembling, livid--a scarecrow of the man we knew;

"It's my boy," he said hoarsely. "And I thought he was the best boy in the county. Oh God!"

A minute may have passed, not more. One guesses that in that brief time the unhappy father saw clearly the inevitable consequences of his own roguery and sharp practice. He had sowed, broadcast, innumerable, nameless little frauds; he reaped a big crime. I looked across those dreary alkaline plains and out of the lovely blue haze beyond I seemed to see the Dumbles' spring wagon rolling to church. Mrs. Dumble's pale, impassive face was turned to the bleak plains. At last I read her aright, that quiet woman of silence. She knew the father of her children from the outer rind to the inmost core. I thought of the pretty daughters, who did not know. And out yonder stood the son.

Ajax beckoned me aside. We whispered together for a moment or two. Then my brother spoke--

"We're going to lead home our colts," he said curtly; "and you can lead home yours. We shall take better care of ours after this experience. They won't be allowed to run wild in the back pasture."

"Boys--Quincey an' me----"

"Shush-h-h!" said Ajax. "That fellow out there is a long way off. I could not swear in a court of law that he is the person we take him to be. Whom he looks like we know, who he is we don't know, and we don't wish to know. So long."

We rode back to our colts.

Pap Spooner was about sixty-five years old, and the greatest miser in San Lorenzo County. He lived on less than a dollar a day, and allowed the rest of his income to accumulate at the rate of one per cent, a month, compound interest.

When Ajax and I first made his acquaintance he was digging post-holes. The day, a day in September, was uncommonly hot. I said, indiscreetly: "Mr. Spooner, why do you dig post-holes?"

With a queer glint in his small, dull grey eyes he replied, curtly: "Why are you boys a-shootin' quail--hey? 'Cause ye like to, I reckon. Fer the same reason I like ter dig post-holes. It's jest recreation-- to me."

When we were out of earshot Ajax laughed.

"Recreation!" said my brother. "Nothing will ever recreate him. Of all the pinchers----"

"Shush-h-h!" said I. "It's too hot."

Our neighbours told many stories of Pap Spooner. Even that bland old fraud, John Jacob Dumble, admitted sorrowfully that he was no match for Pap in a horse, cattle, or pig deal; and George Leadham, the blacksmith, swore that Pap would steal milk from a blind kitten. The humorists of the village were of opinion that Heaven had helped Pap because he had helped himself so freely out of other folks' piles.

In appearance Andrew Spooner was small, thin, and wiry, with the beak of a turkey-buzzard, the complexion of an Indian, and a set of large, white, very ill-fitting false teeth, which clicked like castanets whenever the old man was excited.

Now, in California, "Pap" is a nom de caresse for father. But, so far as we knew, Pap had no children; accordingly we jumped to the conclusion that Andrew Spooner got his nickname from a community who had rechristened the tallest man in our village "Shorty" and the ugliest "Beaut." The humorists knew that Pap might have been the father of the foothills, the George Washington of Paradise, but he wasn't.

Later we learned that Pap had buried a wife and child. And the child, it seems, had called him "Pap." We made the inevitable deduction that such paternal instincts as may have bloomed long ago in the miser's heart were laid in a small grave in the San Lorenzo Cemetery. Our little school-marm, Alethea-Belle Buchanan, said (without any reason): "I