g to ascend from below
the battlements to keep guard till the coroner could come. The little
pack mule to the fore, Wayland and Matthews were picking the way slowly
down the terra cotta trail of the Rim Rocks.

"It does not make the slightest difference in the world what you or I
believe, Sir! The facts are unless you could offer a witness money
enough to take him out the United States and to keep him for the rest
of his life, he would develop a good-forgetter, or else the same old
gag--'been blind folded,' 'didn't see,' and so on, and on, and on; you
can't blame them! I'll bet if every one of the herders had escaped
instead of festering there in the ash heap, they'd all be legging it
out of the country far and fast as they could go."

The little mule came to a stand at a bend in the switch back; and the
old evangelist sat ruminating silently on his broncho.

"Y' have a sheriff?"

Wayland laughed.

"He's like the Indian flies; a no-see-him. He'll ride over the hills
for weeks and if he tumbles over the top of his prisoner, he can't find
his man!"

The old Britisher looked doubtfully at Wayland, as much as to say, "I
don't believe you."

"You're no temptin' me to take the law into our own hands?"

Again Wayland laughed.

"My dear sir, you don't understand! I don't want to drag you into this
at all! For ten years, _the powers that stand for law in this country
have been marking time behind the firing line; while the other fellow
got away with the goods_. They have been marking time while Crime
scored, and what you call the Devil kept tally."

The old man nodded his head approvingly.

"That's all true!"

"You ask me if I intend to break the law? No, Sir, I do not; but _I do
intend to carry the law out beyond the firing line. The thief strains
the law to get away with the goods; I am going to strain the law to get
them back. The murderer strains the law to protect his damned useless
neck; I'm going to strain the law to break his neck_. Unless," he
added, "I break my own neck doing it."

The old man had drawn down his brows. "A don't just like the sound of
it; what's your plan?"

"To go out with a gun till I get them; the way your own Mounted Police
do up in Canada! _I'm going to quit monkeying with technicalities in
the twilight zone . . . and go out . . . after the man_."

The old Britisher sat thinking: "Wayland, if A was managing this thing,
first thing A'd do would be blow such a blast o