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to a few Mexican loungers smoking cigarettes on the long porch.

They reached a point in the road fifty feet, perhaps, beyond the McSween store. Still walking leisurely and interested in their gossipy talk, they did not see six heads lift furtively and six pairs of eyes peep dangerously above the top of a low adobe wall that came out flush with the street at the east end of the McSween store, forming a corner of the side and back yard. Billy the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Tom O'Folliard, Jim French, Frank McNab, and Fred Wayte suddenly straightened up with cocked rifles in their hands from the ambush where they had been lying in wait.

"Billy the Kid," Sheriff Brady was saying, "will never——"

A volley of rifle bullets from the adobe wall cut short his sentence. The sheriff threw up his arms wildly, flinging his rifle ten feet away; he staggered forward a few steps and crashed to the ground. His three companions took to their heels, bullets singing around them. Billy Matthews and "Dad" Peppin reached a little Mexican house close by on the south side of the road and dashed to safety through the door. Hindman kept to the road in his flight. A rifle ball struck him in the back between the shoulders; he stumbled on a little farther and fell in front of San Juan Church.

"Dammit," said Billy the Kid in business-like tones as he pumped another cartridge into his Winchester, "I didn't care so much about old 'Dad' Peppin but I'm sorry we didn't get Matthews."

However, all things considered, it was a fairly good workmanly job in the Kid's critical estimation. Though he had failed to "get" Matthews, there was at least something else that appealed to him as worth getting—Sheriff