t Jack
Corliss."

The sheriff smiled. "Public opinion is setting on the fence and
hanging on with both hands. All right, Joe. I'll play her alone. I
got a wire from Hank that he's got the herder, Fernando. Due here on
the two-thirty. You hang around and tell Hank to keep on--take the
Mexican along up to Usher."

"Goin' to go after the Concho boys and Loring's herders?"

"Sure thing. And I'm going alone. Then they won't make a fuss.
They'll come back with me all right."

"But you couldn't get a jury to send one of 'em over--not in this
county."

"Correct, Joe. But the county's paying me to go through the
motions--don't matter what I think personally. If they've pulled off a
shooting-match at the water-hole, the thing's settled by this time. It
had to come and if it's over, I'm dam' glad. It'll clear the air for
quite a spell to come."

"The papers'll sure make a holler--" began the deputy.

"Not so much as you think. They got one good reason to keep still and
that's because the free range is like to be opened up to homesteaders
any day. Too much noise about cattle-and-sheep war would scare good
money from coming to the State. I heard the other day that that
Sundown Jack picked up is settled at the water-hole. I took him for a
tenderfoot once. I reckon he ain't. It's hard to figure on those
queer kind. Well, you meet the two-thirty. I guess I'll ride over to
the Concho and see the boys."

The Loring-Corliss case is now a matter of record in the dusty files of
the "Usher Sentinel" and its decidedly disesteemed contemporary, the
"Mesa News." The case was dismissed for lack of anything like definite
evidence, though Loring and Corliss were bound over to keep the peace.
Incidentally one tall and angular witness refused to testify, and was
sentenced to pay a not insignificant fine for contempt of court. That
his fine was promptly paid by Corliss furnished a more or less
gratuitous excuse for a wordy vilification of the rancher and his
"hireling assassin," "menace to public welfare," and the like.
Sundown, however, stuck to his guns, even to the extent of searching
out the editor of the "Mesa News" and offering graciously to engage in
hand-to-hand combat, provided the editor, or what was left of him after
the battle, would insert an apology in the next issue of the paper--the
apology to be dictated by Sundown.

The editor temporized by asking the indignant Sundown to frame the
apology, which