"I guess Mark won't lose any sleep over that, and I know I won't."
"All the same, Matt, you'd better look out for him. A coward who fights you behind your back is more to be feared than a braver enemy who faces you in the open."
"That's a cinch. But let's forget Dace Perry for a while and think of something more pleasant. Where's Chub, Susie?"
Before the girl could answer, a husky voice was wafted toward the two from along the road.
"Oh, a bold, bad man was this desperado,
An' he blowed inter town like an ole tornado—
Ta-rooral—ooral—ay!"
Susie and Matt looked in the direction from which this burst of melody—if such it could be called—proceeded. An old man with a wooden leg was approaching, keeping the tempo of his song with jabs of the pin that took the place of his right foot.
"Here's Welcome Perkins," said Matt, with a broad smile, leaning back against the gate-post and fixing his eyes on the old man.
"He's been to town after something for Mark," returned Susie.
Welcome Perkins, otherwise Peg-leg Perkins, otherwise the "reformed road-agent," always reminded Matt of a picture out of a comic supplement. He was little, and wizened, and old—just how old no one knew, but it was popularly supposed that he was somewhere around seventy. He had a pair of the mildest washed-out blue eyes ever set in a man's head, notwithstanding the fact that he was constantly asserting that he had passed his early life as a "pirate of the plains"; and displayed with pride an old, played-out six-shooter whose hand-grip was covered with notches—notches that made Welcome sigh and grow pensive every time he looked at them. Welcome averred that he was trying to live down his lawless past, but that his roaring, rampant, untamed disposition made the effort a struggle and a burden.
The old man wore a long and particularly vicious-looking mustache, which he was constantly training upward at the ends in order to make it even more desperate in appearance. His scanty gray locks were allowed to grow long, and they were surmounted with an old sombrero, always carefully whacked into the regulation Denver "poke." His ragged blue shirt was drawn in at the waist with a U. S. Army belt, from which depended a holster containing the notched and useless weapon already mentioned. Chaparrejos, or "chaps," which, like their owner, had seen better days—or worse and more lawless ones if Welcome's word was to be taken—covered his left lower extremity and all that was left of his right. The right leg of the chaps was cut away at the knee in order to give freer play to the wooden pin.