nemy, but it was not likely; he
had always behaved himself. Somebody would have known of any trouble----

"Maybe somebody followed him from Texas."

"More likely the usual local work," Buck interrupted. "This man Starr
ever met up with Old Man Hooper or Hooper's men?"

But here was another impasse. Starr had been over on the Slick Rock ever
since his arrival. I could have thrown some light on the matter,
perhaps, but new thoughts were coming to me and I kept silence.

Shortly Buck Johnson went out. His departure loosened tongues, among
them mine.

"I don't see why you stand for this old _hombre_ if he's as bad as you
say," I broke in. "Why don't some of you brave young warriors just
naturally pot him?"

And that started a new line of discussion that left me even more
thoughtful than before. I knew these men intimately. There was not a
coward among them. They had been tried and hardened and tempered in the
fierceness of the desert. Any one of them would have twisted the tail of
the devil himself; but they were off Old Man Hooper. They did not make
that admission in so many words; far from it. And I valued my hide
enough to refrain from pointing the fact. But that fact remained: they
were off Old Man Hooper. Furthermore, by the time they had finished
recounting in intimate detail some scores of anecdotes dealing with what
happened when Old Man Hooper winked his wildcat eye, I began in spite
of myself to share some of their sentiments. For no matter how flagrant
the killing, nor how certain morally the origin, never had the most
brilliant nor the most painstaking effort been able to connect with the
slayers nor their instigator. He worked in the dark by hidden hands; but
the death from the hands was as certain as the rattlesnake's. Certain of
his victims, by luck or cleverness, seemed to have escaped sometimes as
many as three or four attempts but in the end the old man's Killers got
them.

A Jew drummer who had grossly insulted Hooper in the Lone Star Emporium
had, on learning the enormity of his crime, fled to San Francisco. Three
months later Soda Springs awoke to find pasted by an unknown hand on the
window of the Emporium a newspaper account of that Jew drummer's taking
off. The newspaper could offer no theory and merely recited the fact
that the man suffered from a heavy-calibred bullet. But always the talk
turned back at last to that crowning atrocity, the Boomerang, with its
windrows of little calves, starv