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on duty; one always, night and day. If he raised his manacled hands thoughtlessly, they watched the gesture with meticulous suspicion. If he tossed in his sleep, a pair of cold gray eyes quickened to keen alertness in the dim light of the midnight lamp.

These two men had been selected as his death watch because they were his enemies and might be depended upon to guard him with the vigilance of hatred until his death upon the gallows worked their revenge. Ollinger hated him because he had killed Bob Beckwith; Bell hated him because he had killed Jimmy Carlyle.

But the two deputies differed in character as night from day. Ollinger was a devil; Bell a man. Ollinger kept up his nagging torture. He gloated over the Kid's unhappy fate. He longed with the eagerness of consuming hatred for the day of the Kid's death. The thought of seeing his enemy choking at a rope's end filled his soul with voluptuous thrills. With the Kid helpless in his power, he took delight in tormenting him, playing with his victim with the purring malice of a cat with a mouse. He harped upon the gallows; he dangled the hangman's noose constantly before the Kid's eyes.

"Good-morning, Kid," was his daily salutation. "One day less between you and the rope."

Though Ollinger's hatred grew more intense as the days went by, Bell's gradually diminished, until at last it merged into pity that was akin to friendship. Bell was a tall, grim-looking man with a livid knife-scar across his cheek, but at heart he was generous and kindly. The mercilessly cold-blooded murder of his friend Carlyle at the Greathouse ranch had inflamed Bell with bitterness against the Kid. But with the gallows looming to wipe out the score, Bell was filled with the sympathy of a