y and muscle of the sheriff's work going out to avenge him,
but the mind of the law remained behind.

It was old Billy, the clerk. No one paid particular attention to Billy,
and they never had. He was useless on a horse and ridiculous with a gun,
and the only place where he seemed formidable was behind a typewriter.
Now he sat looking, down into the dead face of Pete Glass, trying to
grasp the meaning of it all. From the first he had been with Pete, from
the first the invincibility of the little dusty man had been the chief
article of Billy's creed, and now his dull eyes, bleared with thirty
years of clerical labor, wandered around on the galaxy of dead men who
looked down at him from the wall. He leaned over and took the hand of
the sheriff as one would lean to help up a fallen man, but the fingers
were already growing cold, and then Billy realized for the first time
that this was death. Pete Glass had been; Pete Glass was not.

Next he knew that something had to be done, but what it was he could
not tell, for he sat in the sheriff's office and in that room he was
accustomed to stop thinking and receive orders. He went back to his own
little cubby-hole, and sat down behind the typewriter; at once his mind
cleared, thoughts came, and linked themselves into ideas, pictures,
plans.

The murderer must be taken, dead or alive, and those fifteen men had
ridden out to do the necessary thing. They had seemed irresistible, as
they departed; indeed, no living thing they met could withstand them,
human or otherwise, as Billy very well knew. Yet he recalled a saying of
the sheriff, a thing he had insisted upon: "No man on no hoss will ever
ride down Whistlin' Dan Barry. It's been tried before and it's never
worked. I've looked up his history and it can't be done. If he's goin'
to be ran down it's got to be done with relays, like you was runnin'
down a wild hoss." Billy rubbed his bald head and thought and thought.

With that orderliness which had become his habit of mind, from work
with reports and papers, sorting and filing away, Billy went back to
the beginning. Dan Barry was fleeing. He started from Rickett, and nine
chances out of ten he was heading, eventually, towards those practically
impenetrable mountain ranges where the sheriff before had lost the trail
after the escape from the cabin and the killing of Mat Henshaw. Towards
this same region, again, he had retreated after the notorious Killing
at Alder. There was no do