old woman enveloped in a brown wrapper
and a black mantilla, driving before her a burro loaded with kindling
wood tied in small bundles for peddling. Then three shots were fired
down the street, the sound coming clear and snappy through the still
air.

The four rangers quickened from sprawling, symbolic figures of
indolence to alert life, but only one rose to his feet. Three turned
their eyes beseechingly but hopelessly upon the fourth, who had gotten
nimbly up and was buckling his cartridge-belt around him. The three
knew that Lieutenant Bob Buckley, in command, would allow no man of
them the privilege of investigating a row when he himself might go.

The agile, broad-chested lieutenant, without a change of expression in
his smooth, yellow-brown, melancholy face, shot the belt strap through
the guard of the buckle, hefted his sixes in their holsters as a belle
gives the finishing touches to her toilette, caught up his Winchester,
and dived for the door. There he paused long enough to caution his
comrades to maintain their watch upon the bridge, and then plunged
into the broiling highway.

The three relapsed into resigned inertia and plaintive comment.

"I've heard of fellows," grumbled Broncho Leathers, "what was wedded
to danger, but if Bob Buckley ain't committed bigamy with trouble, I'm
a son of a gun."

"Peculiarness of Bob is," inserted the Nueces Kid, "he ain't had
proper trainin'. He never learned how to git skeered. Now, a man ought
to be skeered enough when he tackles a fuss to hanker after readin'
his name on the list of survivors, anyway."

"Buckley," commented Ranger No. 3, who was a misguided Eastern man,
burdened with an education, "scraps in such a solemn manner that I
have been led to doubt its spontaneity. I'm not quite onto his system,
but he fights, like Tybalt, by the book of arithmetic [49]."

[FOOTNOTE 49: like Tybalt . . . arithmetic--_Romeo and Juliet_,
Act III, Sc. i. Mortally wounded by Tybalt, Mercutio
says,
"No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a
church door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: ask
for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave
man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world.--A
plague o' both your houses!--Zounds, a dog, a rat,
a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! a
b