spring and fall round-ups when the saloons and gaming tables
were suddenly flooded with business. Otherwise it was a rare event
indeed which injected excitement into the village.

Such an event was the gathering of Sheriff Pete Glass' posse.

There had been other occasions when Pete and officers before his time
had combed the county to get the cream of the fighting men, but the
gathering of the new posse became different in many ways. In the first
place the call for members was not confined to the county, for though
it stretched as large as many a minor European kingdom, it had not the
population of a respectable manufacturing town, and Pete Glass went far
beyond its bounds to get his trailers. Everywhere he had the posters set
up and on the posters appeared the bait. The state began the game with
a reward of three thousand dollars; the county plastered two thousand
dollars on top of that to make it an even five: then the town of Alder
dug into its deep pockets and produced twenty-five hundred, while
disinterested parties added contributions which swelled the total to a
round ten thousand. Ten thousand dollars reward for the man described
below, dead or alive. Ten thousand dollars which might be earned by the
investment of a single bullet and the pressure on trigger; and above
this the fame which such a deed would bring--no wonder that the
mountain-desert hummed through all its peaks and plains, and stirred
to life. Moreover, the news had gone abroad, the tale of the Killing
of Alder and everything that went before. It went West; it appeared in
newspapers; it cropped up at firesides; it gave a spark of terror to a
myriad conversations; and every one in Rickett felt that the eye of
the nation was upon it; every one in Rickett dreamed nightly of the man
described: "Daniel Barry, called Whistling Dan, about five feet nine or
ten, slender, black hair, brown eyes, age about thirty years."

Secretly, Rickett felt perfectly convinced that Sheriff Pete Glass alone
could handle this fellow and trim his claws for they knew how many a
"bad man" had built a reputation high as Babel and baffled posses and
murdered right and left, until the little dusty man on the little dusty
roan went out alone and came back alone, and another fierce name went
from history into legend. However, there were doubters, since this
affair had new earmarks. It had been buzzed abroad that Whistling Dan
was not only the hunted, but also the hunter, and th