e was that of a course, brutal,
Germanic gladiator, devoid of strategy; a bluff, stubborn,
give-and-take fighter, who drove bull-headed at whatever opposed him.
But El Paso soon learned that he could handle his guns with as deadly
dexterity as did his forebears their nets and tridents.

Asked his business with the Council, he said he had heard they had
failed to find a marshal who could hold the town down, and allowed he'd
like to try the job if the Council would make it worth his while.
Questioned as to his views, he explained that he was there to make some
good money for himself and save the city more; if they would pay him
five hundred dollars a month for two months, they could discharge all
their deputies and he would go it alone and agree to clear the town of
toughs or draw no pay. The Mayor and Council were paralyzed in a
double sense: by the wild audacity of this proposal, and by their
memory of recent threats of the thug-leaders that they would massacre
the Council to a man if any further attempts were made to circumscribe
their activities. Some were openly for declining the offer, but in the
end a majority gained heart of Stoudenmayer's own hardihood
sufficiently to hire him.

The rest of the night Stoudenmayer employed in quietly familiarizing
himself with the personnel of the enemy. He lost no time. At daylight
the next morning, several notices, manually written in a rude hand and
each bearing the signature of the rude hand that wrote it, were found
conspicuously posted between Oregon Street and the Plaza. The
signature was, "Bill Stoudenmayer, City Marshal."

The notice was brief but pointed:

"Any of the hold-ups named below I find in town after three o'clock
to-day, I'm going to kill on sight."

Then followed seventy names. The list was carefully chosen: all
"pikers" and "four-flushers" were omitted; none but the _elite_ of the
gun-twirling, black-jack swinging toughs was included. Hardly a single
man was named in the list lacking a more or less gory record.

By the toughs Stoudenmayer was taken as a jest, by respectable citizens
as a lunatic. Heavy odds were offered that he would not last till
noon, with few takers. And yet throughout the morning Stoudenmayer
quietly walked the streets, unaccompanied save by his two guns and his
conspicuously displayed marshal's star.

Nothing happened until about two o'clock, when two men sprang out from
ambush behind the big cottonwood tree that then st