e material offered there
was not the making of one side of a man. Two of them were creatures of
the opposing gambling factions, the other a weak-kneed fellow with the
pale eyes of a coward, put forward by the conservative business men who
deplored much shooting in the name of the law.

How they were to get on without much shooting, Judge Thayer did not
understand. Not a bit of it. What he wanted was a man who would do more
shooting than ever had been done before, a man who would clean the place
of the too-ready gun-slingers who had gathered there, making the town's
notoriety their capital, invading even the respectable districts in
their nightly debaucheries to such insolent boldness that a man's wife
or daughter dared not show her ear on the street after nightfall.

Judge Thayer put the town's troubles from him with a sigh and leaned to
his work. He was preparing a defense for a cattle thief whom he knew to
be guilty, but whose case he had undertaken on account of his wife and
several small children living in a tent behind the principal
gambling-house. Because it seemed a hopeless case from the jump, Judge
Thayer had set his beard firmer in the direction of the fight. Hopeless
cases were the kind that had come most frequently his way all the days
of his life. He had been fronting for the under pup so long that his own
chances had dwindled down to a distant point in his gray-headed years.
But there was lots of satisfaction behind him to contemplate even though
there might not be a great deal of prosperity ahead. That helped a man
wonderfully when it came to casting up accounts. So he was bent to the
cattle thief's case when a man appeared in his door.

This was a tall, bony man with the dust of the long trail on him; a
sour-faced man of thin visage, with long and melancholy nose, a lowering
frown in his unfriendly, small red eyes. A large red mustache drooped
over his mouth, the brim of his sombrero was pressed back against the
crown as if he had arrived devil-come-headlong against a heavy wind.

Judge Thayer took him for a cattleman seeking legal counsel, and invited
him in. The visitor shifted the chafed gear that bore his weapon, as if
to ease it around his gaunt waist, and entered, removing his hat. He
stood a little while looking down at Judge Thayer, a disturbance in his
weathered face that might have been read for a smile, a half-mocking,
half-humorous expression that twitched his big mustache with a catlike
s