Chapter 8 - Page 2

sunburned nose was strangely incongruous.

"So you're a Ranger, and got notches on your gun." Blaze rolled and lit a tiny cigarette, scarcely larger than a wheat straw. "Well, you'd ought to make a right able thief-catcher, Dave, only for your size--you're too long for a man and you ain't long enough for a snake. Still, I reckon a thief would have trouble getting out of your reach, and once you got close to him--How many men have you killed?"

"Counting Mexicans?" Law inquired, with a smile.

"Hell! Nobody counts them."

"Not many."

"That's good." Blaze nodded and relit his cigarette, which he had permitted promptly to smolder out. "The Force ain't what it was. Most of the boys nowadays join so they can ride a horse cross- lots, pack a pair of guns, and give rein to the predilections of a vicious ancestry. They're bad rams, most of 'em."

"There aren't many," said Paloma. "Dave tells me the whole Force has been cut down to sixteen."

"That's plenty," her father averred. "It's like when Cap'n Bill McDonald was sent to stop a riot in Dallas. He came to town alone, and when the citizens asked him where his men was, he said, 'Hell! 'Ain't I enough? There's only one riot.' Are you workin' up a case, Dave?"

"Um-m--yes! People are missing a lot of stock hereabouts."

"It's these blamed refugees from the war! A Mexican has to steal something or he gets run down and pore. If it ain't stock, it's something else. Why, one morning I rode into Jonesville in time to see four Greasers walkin' down the main street with feed-sacks over their shoulders. Each one of those gunnie's had something long and flat and heavy in it, and I growed curious. When I investigated, what d'you suppose I found? Tombstones! That's right; four marble beauties fresh from the cemetery. Well, it made me right sore, for I'd helped to start Jonesville. I was its city father. I'd made the place fit to live in, and I aimed to keep it safe to die in, and so, bein' a sort of left-handed, self- appointed deppity-sheriff, I rounded up those ghouls and drove 'em to the county-seat in my spring wagon. I had the evidence propped up against the front of our real-estate office--'Sacred to the Memory' of four of our leading citizens--so I jailed 'em. But that's all the good it did."

"Couldn't convict, eh?"

Blaze lit his cigarette for the third time. "The prosecuting attorney and I wasn't very good friends, seeing as how I'd had to kill his daddy, so he turned 'em loose. I'm damned if those four Greasers didn't beat me back to Jonesville." Blaze shook his head ruminatively. "This was a hard country, those days. There wasn't but two honest men in this whole valley--and the other one was a nigger."

Dave Law's duties as a Ranger