or establish branches
or work on a railroad, are you?'

"'You don't understand,' says Luke. 'I'm tired of space and horizons
and territory and distances and things like that. What I want is
reasonable contraction. I want a yard with a fence around it that you
can go out and set on after supper and listen to whip-poor-wills,'
says Luke.

"That's the kind of a man he was. He was home-like, although he'd had
bad luck in such investments. But he never talked about them times on
the ranch. It seemed like he'd forgotten about it. I wondered how,
with his ideas of yards and chickens and notions of lattice-work, he'd
seemed to have got out of his mind that kid of his that had been taken
away from him, unlawful, in spite of his decree of court. But he
wasn't a man you could ask about such things as he didn't refer to in
his own conversation.

"I reckon he'd put all his emotions and ideas into being sheriff.
I've read in books about men that was disappointed in these poetic
and fine-haired and high-collared affairs with ladies renouncing
truck of that kind and wrapping themselves up into some occupation
like painting pictures, or herding sheep, or science, or teaching
school--something to make 'em forget. Well, I guess that was the way
with Luke. But, as he couldn't paint pictures, he took it out in
rounding up horse thieves and in making Mojada County a safe place
to sleep in if you was well armed and not afraid of requisitions or
tarantulas.

"One day there passes through Bildad a bunch of these money investors
from the East, and they stopped off there, Bildad being the dinner
station on the I. & G. N. They was just coming back from Mexico
looking after mines and such. There was five of 'em--four solid
parties, with gold watch chains, that would grade up over two hundred
pounds on the hoof, and one kid about seventeen or eighteen.

"This youngster had on one of them cowboy suits such as tenderfoots
bring West with 'em; and you could see he was aching to wing a couple
of Indians or bag a grizzly or two with the little pearl-handled gun
he had buckled around his waist.

"I walked down to the depot to keep an eye on the outfit and see that
they didn't locate any land or scare the cow ponies hitched in front
of Murchison's store or act otherwise unseemly. Luke was away after a
gang of cattle thieves down on the Frio, and I always looked after the
law and order when he wasn't there.

"After dinner this boy comes out of the