tion lent him by
the pair of gold-rimmed spectacles owlishly perched upon his sunburned
nose was strangely incongruous.

"So you're a Ranger, and got notches on your gun." Blaze rolled and lit
a tiny cigarette, scarcely larger than a wheat straw. "Well, you'd
ought to make a right able thief-catcher, Dave, only for your
size--you're too long for a man and you ain't long enough for a snake.
Still, I reckon a thief would have trouble getting out of your reach,
and once you got close to him--How many men have you killed?"

"Counting Mexicans?" Law inquired, with a smile.

"Hell! Nobody counts them."

"Not many."

"That's good." Blaze nodded and relit his cigarette, which he had
permitted promptly to smolder out. "The Force ain't what it was. Most
of the boys nowadays join so they can ride a horse cross-lots, pack a
pair of guns, and give rein to the predilections of a vicious ancestry.
They're bad rams, most of 'em."

"There aren't many," said Paloma. "Dave tells me the whole Force has
been cut down to sixteen."

"That's plenty," her father averred. "It's like when Cap'n Bill
McDonald was sent to stop a riot in Dallas. He came to town alone, and
when the citizens asked him where his men was, he said, 'Hell! 'Ain't I
enough? There's only one riot.' Are you workin' up a case, Dave?"

"Um-m--yes! People are missing a lot of stock hereabouts."

"It's these blamed refugees from the war! A Mexican has to steal
something or he gets run down and pore. If it ain't stock, it's
something else. Why, one morning I rode into Jonesville in time to see
four Greasers walkin' down the main street with feed-sacks over their
shoulders. Each one of those gunnie's had something long and flat and
heavy in it, and I growed curious. When I investigated, what d'you
suppose I found? Tombstones! That's right; four marble beauties fresh
from the cemetery. Well, it made me right sore, for I'd helped to start
Jonesville. I was its city father. I'd made the place fit to live in,
and I aimed to keep it safe to die in, and so, bein' a sort of
left-handed, self-appointed deppity-sheriff, I rounded up those ghouls
and drove 'em to the county-seat in my spring wagon. I had the evidence
propped up against the front of our real-estate office--'Sacred to the
Memory' of four of our leading citizens--so I jailed 'em. But that's
all the good it did."

"Couldn't convict, eh?"

Blaze lit his cigarette for the third time. "The prosecuting attorney
and I