ded it. Maunders, discovering
the injury to his property, charged over to Mrs. McGeeney's house with
blood in his eyes. She was waiting for him with a butcher-knife in her
hand.

"Come on, ye damn bully!" she exclaimed. "Come on! I'm ready for ye!"

Maunders did not accept the invitation, and thereafter gave Mrs.
McGeeney a wide berth.

There had been talk early in 1883 of organizing Billings County in
which Little Missouri was situated. The stimulus toward this project
had come from Jake Maunders, Bill Williams, and Hogue, backed by the
unholy aggregation of saloon rats and floaters who customarily
gathered around them. Merrifield and the Ferrises, who had taken the
first steps in the community toward the reign of law when they had
refused to buy stolen horses, were heartily anxious to secure some
form of organized government, for they had no sympathy with the
lawlessness that made the settlement a perilous place for honest men.
But they were wise enough to see that the aim of Jake Maunders and his
crew in organizing the county was not the establishment of law and
order, but the creation of machinery for taxation on which they could
wax fat. The Maltese Cross group therefore objected strenuously to any
attempt on the part of the other group to force the organization of
the county. Merrifield, Sylvane and Joe, and two or three ranchmen and
cowboys who gathered around them, among them Gregor Lang and Bill
Dantz (an attractive youngster of eighteen who had a ranch half a
dozen miles south of the Maltese Cross), were in the minority, but
they were respected and feared, and in the face of their opposition
even such high-handed scoundrels as Maunders, Hogue, and Williams
developed a vein of caution.

Meanwhile public safety was preserved in ways that were not altogether
lawful, but were well known to all who lived in frontier communities.

"Many is the man that's cleared that bend west of Little Missouri with
bullets following his heels," said Merrifield, years after. "That's
the way we had of getting rid of people we didn't like. There was no
court procedure, just a notice to get out of town and a lot of
bullets, and, you bet, they got out."

Little Missouri's leading citizens were a wild crew, but with all
their violence and their villainy, they were picturesque beings, and
were by no means devoid of redeeming traits. Frank Vine, who evidently
thought nothing of robbing his employers and was drunk more than half
th