Troy Gilbert had put it most hopefully when he said that he knew fireworks pretty well—or one might say that the statement was susceptible of two different interpretations. As a matter of fact, Troy knew fireworks only from the spectator's side of the question.
He now had José Romero moved over into the back room of his place, where he might mitigate the rigors of that alien's confinement, and at the same time receive from the Mexican very necessary instruction.
Mercifully, there was an ample supply of fireworks, for the show was to be repeated at Antelope, over in Lone Jack County, and again at Cinche.
Moreover, drawing heavily, as he had been instructed, upon Kid Barringer's bank account, Gilbert wrote to Fort Worth and ordered a duplicate set of these fireworks sent on to Cinche. And in the darkness of night, when Blowout was wrapped in slumber, Gilbert and Romero rode silently out, down the flank of the divide, across the plain and into a little cañon six or seven miles distant in the breaks of Wild Horse Creek.
All day, in the intervals of his business duties, Gilbert had been receiving theoretical instructions; now with the set of fireworks which was to have dazzled and delighted the residents of Antelope, he made practical experiment of the knowledge so gained. The little show, witnessed only by the naked walls of the cañon and such prairie-dogs and jack-rabbits as had been untimely aroused from their slumbers, went off fairly well—which is to say that most of Gilbert's fingers and nearly all of his features went back to Blowout sound and entire.
"Oh, I got the hang of the business," he declared again and again, as they rode along through the soft Texas night; "I got the hang of it. I can make the whole first part go all right. The thing now is to get that Columbia act fixed so as to give the boys a run for their money, and leave a chance for Minnie and Kid."
The two rode home, and later José went to bed in Gilbert's back room, where work was going forward upon a mysterious-looking structure.
II
"In our village hall a Justice stands:
A neater form was never made of board."
Frosty La Rue's grand aggregation of talent had given two shows in a tent on the third of July.