Slim rose, leaned against the bar. There was fight in him still and seeing a bottle in front of him, he seized it with manacled hands, started to lift it.
“Slim,” Brown said calmly, “if you lift that bottle you’ll never lift another.”
The bad boy instinctively knew the look that pages death and Slim’s fingers fell from the bottle.
Greenwater had no jail and Brown took him to his own cabin. Leaving the manacles on the prisoner he took his shoes, locked them in a closet. No man drunk or sober he reflected, would tackle barefoot the gravelled street littered with thousands of broken liquor bottles. Then he went to bed.
Waking later, he discovered that Slim had vanished and with him, Brown’s number 12 shoes. He tried Slim’s shoe but couldn’t get his foot into it. There was nothing to do but follow barefoot. He left a blood-stained trail, but at 2 a.m. he found Slim in a blacksmith shop having the handcuffs removed. Brown retrieved his shoes and on the return trip Slim went barefoot. After hog-tying his prisoner Brown chained him to the bed and went to sleep.
Thereafter, the bad boys scratched Greenwater off their calling list.
Slim afterwards attained fame with Villa in Mexico, became a good citizen and later went East, established a sanatorium catering to the wealthy and acquired a fortune.
Among the first arrivals in Greenwater was a lanky adventurer known to the Indians as Long Man and to whites for his ability to make money in any venture and an even more marvelous inability to keep it. He was Ralph Jacobus Fairbanks. Broke at the time, he was seeking the quickest way to a “comeback.”
Foreseeing that the biggest names in copper meant a rush, he had taken a look at the little stagnant spring with a green scum that was to give the town its name.
“Not enough water in it to do the family washing,” he decided and with uncanny talent for seeing opportunity where others would starve to death, he was soon peddling water at a dollar a bucket. He had hauled it 40 miles uphill from Furnace Creek wash.