Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XIV. HIS Bill Lawson," said Dick, knocking the ashes from his pipe, " was some in his day. I have told you about his trappin' qualities—that there was only one man in the county that could lay over him any, an' that was ole Bob Kelly. But Bill had some strange ways about him, sometimes, that I could not understand, an' the way he acted a'most made me think he was crazy. Sometimes you could n't find a more jolly feller than he was; an' then, again, he would settle down into one of his gloomy spells, an' I could n't get a word out of him. He would sit by the camp-fire, an' first fall to musing; then he would cover his face with his hands, an' I could see the big, scalding tears trickle through his fingers, an' his big frame would quiver and shake like a tree in a gale of wind; then he would pull out his long, heavy huntin'-knife, an' I could see that he had several notches cut in the handle. Hewould count these over an' over again; an' I could see a dark scowl settle on his face, that would have made me tremble if I had not known that I was his only sworn friend, an' he would mutter, " ' Only seven ! only seven ! There ought to be eight. There is one left. He must not escape me. No, no; he must die !' " An' then he would sheath his knife, an' roll himself up in his blanket, an' cry himself to sleep like a child. " I had been with ole Bill a'most ten years— ever since I was a boy—but he had never told me the cause of his trouble. I did n't dare to ask him, for the ole man had curious ways sometimes, an' I knowed he wouldn't think it kind of me to go pryin' into his affairs, an' I knowed, too, that some day he would tell me all about it. " One night—we had been followin' up a bar all day—we camped on the side of a high mountain. It was very cold. The wind howled...