"Not till we've finished out our term, you lazy vagabond! Meanwhile, sink the title. I travel on my soldiership, and you're in the same boat!"
"Amen! if it has to be," acquiesced Barney, with philosophic resignation, saluting meekly. "And phwat's the next orders, me lord—Sergeant, I should say?"
"For the present you can take charge and administer the law, unless anything demanding a judicial mind comes up, while I wander on incog., and do a little prospecting to identify the toughs and crooks that give this the name of the blackest district in all the great Northwest! I've begun rather well; I've just rounded up Bully Nick and his sharp-shooting gang!"
"Ye have?" Barney's jaw dropped with amazement. "Single-handed?"
"Aye; but forewarned is four-armed, you know!"
"Even so. Mother of Grace——"
"Tut, tut, man; that's but a flea bite in the ocean, as one of our Irish philosophers remarked. There's a regularly organized band of thieves—aye, who don't stick at murder, either—that hold up stages, terrorize the whole community, and play the dickens generally. The scum of all nationalities, their headquarters are across the boundary in Uncle Sam's domain, while their field of operations is the whole Northwest. The thing is to identify them, catch them redhanded in our precincts."
"A Herculaneum task, me lordship—Sergeant, I should say—and more, since that gintleman had only twelve impossibilities to conquer!"
"Och, Hercules! I'd sooner any day be a whole man than just half a god like Hercules! Any able-bodied son of Erin should be able to match Hercules, except in the snake-strangling trick, since divvle an example did Saint Patrick leave us to practice on."
"Thrue," assented Barney. "Many's the dhrink I've laid on it that the only snakes an Irishman is capable of behoulding is all in his own eye."