was to git a education what the professor would be tellin'
me to do next. Most like he'd be tellin' me to learn preachin' or
somethin'. Then if I was to git to be a preacher, I reckon all I could
do next would be to go to heaven. Shucks! Arizona's good enough for
me."

But Pete was not thinking of Arizona alone--of the desert, the hills
and the mesas, the canons and arroyos, the illimitable vistas and the
color and vigor of that land. Persistently there rose before his
vision the trim, young figure of a nurse who had wonderful gray
eyes . . . "I'm sure goin' loco," he told himself. "But I ain't so
loco that she's goin' to know it."

"I suppose you'll be hitting the trail over the hill right soon," said
Owen as he returned from the station and seated himself in one of the
ample chairs on the hotel veranda. "Have a cigar."

Pete shook his head.

"They're all right. That El Paso lawyer smokes 'em."

"They ought to be all right," asserted Pete.

"Did he touch you pretty hard?"

"Oh, say two thousand, jest like that!"

The sheriff whistled. "Shooting-scrapes come high."

"Oh, I ain't sore at him. What makes me sore is this here law that
sticks a fella up and takes his money--makin' him pay for somethin' he
never done. A poor man would have a fine chance, fightin' a rich man
in court, now, wouldn't he?"

"There's something in that. The _Law_, as it stands, is all right."

"Mebby. But she don't stand any too steady when a poor man wants to
fork her and ride out of trouble. He's got to have a morral full of
grain to git her to stand--and even then she's like to pitch him if she
gits a chanct. I figure she's a bronco that never was broke right."

"Well,"--and Owen smiled,--"we got pitched this time. We lost our
case."

"You kind o' stepped up on the wrong side," laughed Pete.

"I don't know about that. _Somebody_ killed Sam Brent."

"I reckon they did. But supposin'--'speakin' kind o' offhand'--that
you had the fella--and say I was witness, and swore the fella killed
Brent in self-defense--where would he git off?"

"That would depend entirely on his reputation--and yours."

"How about the reputation of the fella that was killed?"

"Well, it was Brent's reputation that got you off to-day, as much as
your own. Brent was foreman for The Spider, which put him in bad from
the start, and he was a much older man than you. He was the kind to do
just what you said he did--try to hold you up and