ing.

"You needn't say nothin' more--I see it shinin' in your eyes," cried
Slim.

"Jack! Jack!" he shouted, "you derned idiot, come a-runnin--"

Payson hurried up from the arroyo within which he had been waiting.

"Echo, I have not altogether failed in my mission. I have not brought
Dick Lane back, but I hope I come from him bearing something of his
loyalty and simple faith. If you ever can learn to trust me again--if
you ever can learn to love me--" he said to Echo humbly.

"Don't be a derned fool, Jack," blurted Slim; "can't you see she ain't
never loved no one else?"

"Echo, is it so?" asked Jack eagerly.

Slim grinned. Going over to Echo's side, he gave her a slight push,
saying: "Go tell him."

"Jack!" was her only cry, as her husband enfolded her in his arms.

* * * * * * *

With the next election for sheriff in Pinal County, William Henry
Harrison Hoover had no opposition, for Buck McKee's nomination for that
office of one Peruna, formerly of the Lazy K outfit, was not ratified
for several reasons, the chief of which was that W. H. H. Hoover, alias
Slim, had, just previous to election, officially declared that the said
Peruna was deceased, having come to his death in the jail-yard of Pinal
County, by a sudden drop at the end of a new hempen rope, which did not
break, as Slim, before the ceremony, had assured the apprehensive
Peruna it would not.

The sudden and successive removals of its two most honored and
influential members, Buck McKee and Peruna, greatly demoralized the
Lazy K outfit, and the demoralization was completed by the pernicious
activity of the reelected Sheriff in interfering with the main purpose
of that industrial organization, which was the merger of the Sweetwater
cattle-business through a gradual amalgamation of all brands into the
Lazy K. One by one the captains or cavaliers of this industry sought
more congenial regions, where public inquisition into such purely
private concerns as theirs was not so vigorously prosecuted.

It must not be thought that the social graces and persuasive abilities
of Sheriff Hoover were confined to the conduct of legalized
necktie-parties and the dispersion of outlaws. In its extended account
of the "Lane-Hope Nuptials," the Florence Kicker devoted much of the
space to the part taken by the "best man" in the ceremony, "our genial
and expansive boniface of the new county apartment hotel." And soon
after it r