ad happened. He
chewed his cigar, then spat it out with an unintelligible exclamation.

"Martin's no worse than others," he said. "Blandy leans to crooked faro.
I've tried to stop that, anyway. If Steele can, more power to him!"

Sampson turned on his heel then and left me with a queer feeling of
surprise and pity.

He had surprised me before, but he had never roused the least sympathy.
It was probably that Sampson was indeed powerless, no matter what his
position.

I had known men before who had become involved in crime, yet were too
manly to sanction a crookedness they could not help.

Miss Sampson had been standing in her door. I could tell she had heard;
she looked agitated. I knew she had been talking to her father.

"Russ, he hates the Ranger," she said. "That's what I fear. It'll bring
trouble on us. Besides, like everybody here, he's biased. He can't see
anything good in Steele. Yet he says: 'More power to him!' I'm
mystified, and, oh, I'm between two fires!"

* * * * *

Steele's next noteworthy achievement was as new to me as it was strange
to Linrock. I heard a good deal about it from my acquaintances, some
little from Steele, and the concluding incident I saw and heard myself.

Andy Vey was a broken-down rustler whose activity had ceased and who
spent his time hanging on at the places frequented by younger and better
men of his kind. As he was a parasite, he was often thrown out of the
dens.

Moreover, it was an open secret that he had been a rustler, and the men
with whom he associated had not yet, to most of Linrock, become known as
such.

One night Vey had been badly beaten in some back room of a saloon and
carried out into a vacant lot and left there. He lay there all that
night and all the next day. Probably he would have died there had not
Steele happened along.

The Ranger gathered up the crippled rustler, took him home, attended to
his wounds, nursed him, and in fact spent days in the little adobe house
with him.

During this time I saw Steele twice, at night out in our rendezvous. He
had little to communicate, but was eager to hear when I had seen Jim
Hoden, Morton, Wright, Sampson, and all I could tell about them, and the
significance of things in town.

Andy Vey recovered, and it was my good fortune to be in the Hope So when
he came in and addressed a crowd of gamesters there.

"Fellers," he said, "I'm biddin' good-by to them as was once my friends.