“He’s just finished a long stretch in the stir at Canon City. His health ain’t none too good, so he jumps over into Utah and down on the poultice route, where he won’t be pestered by bulls while he’s recuperatin’ on good fresh air an’ green vegetables an’ plenty of bread and milk. He flops in a haystack five miles out of the town where you people cut the caper. At daylight the next morning the hoosiers drag him out and he thinks they’re goin’ to lynch him. They take him into the town an’ give him a look at the stiff laid out on the courthouse floor. He raps to George, an’ just as you say, he is almost cut in half by the two shotgun loads. Red don’t see any use in givin’ himself a bawl-out by identifyin’ any dead burglars, so he dummies up on the natives an’ in a couple of days they let him go, an’ he keeps on goin’, for they are proper hostile. When Roch’ Red tells me this, I dash into Portland and out over the Short Line into Pocatello, an’ tells Mary.”

“What was all your hurry about?” I asked.

“Hah,” Hannibal replied. “That’s somethin’ Red didn’t know, an’ somethin’ you don’t know. But you’re all right, an’ I don’t mind tellin’ you.