s as a
tribute to his dead friend.

"I took him in to the Inspector. He became a detective for us. You
see, the rustlers were getting a bit the better of us because they knew
the Cypress Hills and we never had force enough to take time to study
them. Blue Pete didn't need to. He could pick up a trail anywhere and
follow it like a blood-hound. . . . I learned a little from him;
that's why I'm up here. With his assistance we ran down some of the
rustlers. It was he proved to us that our own ranchers were among the
rustlers--proved it to his own destruction. It was at the trial of one
of them that he received the blow that sent him wild again. For a week
he'd been on the trail of that fellow, a man we'd long suspected, half
rancher, half hotel-keeper, and his nerves were a bit raw from lack of
sleep and being forced into the open. You see, it meant giving up all
the cow-punching he loved, for no rancher would employ him then."

A flash of anger lit the Sergeant's face.

"The Judge questioned his evidence--doubted it--even censured the
Police for using such an acknowledged rustler. . . . Pete left the
courtroom straight for the old game . . . and I, his old friend--I was
put on his track. It was my duty. In the meantime some of his old
companions from the Badlands crossed the border. I don't know whether
Blue Pete joined up with them or not. If he did there are so many
things can't be explained. We caught a few of them--including a white
girl who--who also had gone wild. She was--a friend of mine, too,
once. When we caught her brothers, who owned one of the best ranches
in the district, the 3-bar-Y, and they--killed themselves, she just
broke away. She and Blue Pete worked together. I think they loved
each other. It was a crazy venture of hers that put her in our hands.
She got six months. . . .

"It was spring when she came out, early spring this year. A gang of
Badland rustlers got into the Hills. We surrounded them, and I went in
with one companion on a trail of blood from a lucky shot we'd got at
them when they tried to break through for the border. The wounded man
ambushed me . . . but Blue Pete--he'd been creeping along beside me all
the time--took the bullet instead of me. He managed to tell me the
rustlers' rendezvous, and then something struck me on the head and I
dropped. My companion came to my assistance then. I guess I was
half-crazy from the blow, and from the awful wound I'd see