al criminal.' It was all over in half an hour, and Ike Martin and the sheriff had Dick in a buggy and on the way to Stoneburg. They reached the jail about nine o'clock at night, and drove up to the gate. Well, sir, Ike got out on one side and the sheriff he got out on t'other, so they could get close to him when he got down, and, by gosh! 'fore they knowed where they was at, Dick give a spring clear over the dashboard and that's the last they see of him for two months. One day, after they'd hunted him high and low and lay 'round his mother's cabin, and jumped in on her half a dozen times in the middle of the night, hopin' to get him,—for Polk had offered a reward of five hundred dollars, dead or alive,—Ike come in to my place all het up and his eyes a-hangin' out, and he say, 'Gimme your long gun, quick, we got Dick Sands.' I says, 'How do you know?' and he says, 'Some boys seen smoke comin' out of a mineral hole half a mile up the mountain above Hell's Diggin's, and Dick's in there with a bed and blanket, and we're goin' to lay for him to-night and plug him when he comes out if he don't surrender.' And I says, 'You can't have no gun o' mine to shoot Dick, and if I knowed where he was I'd go tell him.' The room was full when he asked for my gun, and some o' the boys from Hell's Diggin's heard him and slid off through the woods, and when the sheriff and his men got there they see the smoke still comin' up, and lay in the bushes all night watchin'. 'Bout an hour after daylight they crep' up. The fire was out and so was Dick, and all they found was a chicken half cooked and a quilt off his mother's bed.

"'Bout a week after that, one Saturday night, a feller come runnin' up the street from the market, sayin' Dick had walked into his place just as he was closin' up,—he had a stall in the public market under the city hall, where the court is,—and asked him polite as you please for a cup of coffee and a piece