,
New Mexico, and the more settled parts of Texas. They were the hardier
sons of an adventurous race, for each man had to make good his footing
by his own strength. At first there had been no law except that which
lay in the good-will of men, and the holster by their side. The sheriff
of Wheeler County had neither the deputies nor the financial backing to
carry justice into the mesquite. Game gunmen served as marshals in the
towns, but these had no authority on the plains. Until Captain Ellison
and his little company of Rangers moved into the district there had been
no way of taking law into the chaparral. The coming of these quiet men
in buckskin was notice to the bad-man that murder and robbery were not
merely pleasant pastimes.

Yet it would be easy to overstate the lawlessness of the Panhandle.
There were bad men. Every frontier of civilization has them. But of all
the great cattle country which stretched from Mexico to the Canadian
line none had a finer or more orderly citizenry than this. The country
was notably free of the bloodshed which drenched such places as Dodge
City to the east or Lincoln County, New Mexico, to the west of the
Panhandle.

Ellison wanted the Dinsmores, not because he believed he could yet hang
any serious crime on them but for the moral effect upon them and the
community. Clint Wadley had gone looking for trouble and had been
wounded in consequence. No Texas jury would convict on that count. But
it was not a conviction the fire-eating little Captain wanted just now.
He intended to show that his boys could go out and arrest the Dinsmores
or any other lawbreakers, whenever the occasion called for it. It might
take them a week or a month or six months, but they would bag their game
in the end. The rule of the Texas Rangers was to sleep on a man's trail
until they found him.

The Captain stationed a man at each of the three towns. He sent two on a
scouting-trip through No Man's Land, and two more to search Palo Duro
Canon. He watched the stages as they went and came, questioned
mule-skinners with freight outfits, kept an eye on _tendejons_ and
feed-corrals. And at the end of three weeks he had no results whatever
to show, except a sarcastic note from Pete Dinsmore complimenting him on
his force of Rangers.

The Captain was furious, but not a whit discouraged.

"Dog it, we'll fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," he
told Lieutenant Hawley, his second in command.

To them cam