Evidence

n his skull, and my saddle burned my hand if I touched it where the sun struck it. There was a trickling stream of perspiration down either cheek, and a third stream down my nose. From time to time I smudged the dust across my face in an attempt to stop the streams, but the action merely interrupted their course.

It was in this peculiarly Texan atmosphere that I came upon Jimmy Calton.

He was standing by the open hood of one of those mechanical miracles known as a "tin lizzy," holding a sooted spark-plug in a cloth in one hand and attempting to clean it with the other. He was swearing the while, dispassionately, in a curious mingling of good Anglo-Saxon and 'dobe Spanish.

"Hello, Jimmy," I said listlessly.

He looked up and nodded.

"Say, you look hot," he observed. "Come on an' ride a ways with me. Lizzy heah'll be runnin' in a minute, an' you can tie yo' pony on behind."

"Going anywhere in particular?" I asked.

"Over t' see th' coroner," he told me. "Ol' Abe Martin got shot th' other day an' folks are say