“Good,” Isinglass said. “He’s spoilt my morning once too often, and another benefit is this fellow here has a horse to sit on once we get around to hanging him.”

“I thought you didn’t want to hang him,” the white-faced, puzzled Texan said. “That’s just what Johnny wanted to do.”

“Yes, but he was much too loud about it,” Isinglass said. “I don’t like to be told what to do with my prisoners by a man who can’t even count.”

“I guess I just lost the schoolteaching job,” I said very quietly.

Isinglass smiled at me, whether in appreciation of the statement or the soft tones I don’t know.

“As to that, I was merely thinking ahead to the time when we’re civilized up, like the Europe folks,” he said. “Right now there’s no children to teach and no school to teach them in. But I’ve always been one to think ahead.”

He sat back down by the fire and rummaged in his saddlebags. I thought he was probably looking for chewing tobacco, but to my astonishment he came out with a ragged and obviously much read copy of Orson Oxx on the Pirate Isle; or, Captain Kidd’s Defeat.

“I have to do my reading in the morning,” he said. “My eyes ain’t good enough to read at night, unless I’m parked right under a lamp.”

He must have noticed my astonishment at the sight of the book. The last thing I expected to see in the hands of the shifty old brute was one of my tales.

“Why, have you read it?” he asked. “It’s a fine yarn.”

“Mr. Isinglass, I wrote it,” I said.

23.

My announcement startled the old man—a chill came into his eyes, just as it had a moment before he clubbed the Texan to death.

“You’re nimble to make a claim like that,” he said. “You’re kind of a circus monkey yourself, I guess—and anxious to miss the hanging.”

“It’s true I’d rather not be hung,” I admitted. “But it’s also true that I wrote that book and the seventeen others in the same series. They’re all listed on the back wrapper—if you’d like I’ll recite them to you.”