ugs. It's gall and
wormwood to him. He's up against a hard proposition, as we all know;
if he is half-sick, I wonder if the proposition isn't going to be too
much for him? Can't you advise him, persuade him to knock off for a
couple of weeks and clear out? Get into a city somewhere and forget
his work. Why, it's the most pitiful thing in the world to see a man
like him lose his grip."

"He is not quite himself," she admitted slowly. "He is more nervous,
inclined to be short and irritable, than he used to be. You may be
right; or it may be simply that his continued failure to stop these
crimes is wearing him down. I'll be glad to watch him, to talk with
him if he will listen to me."

But first she forced herself to what seemed a casual chat with Patten,
finding him loitering upon the hotel veranda. She suggested to him
that Norton was beginning to show the strain, that he looked haggard
under it, and wondered if he had quite recovered from his recent
illness?

Patten, after his pompous way, leaned back in his chair, his thumbs in
his armholes, his manner that of a most high judge.

"He's as well as I am," he announced positively. "Thin, to be sure,
just from being laid up those ten days. And from a lot of hard riding
and worry. That's all."

Out of Patten's vest-pocket peeped a lead-pencil. Curiously enough, it
carried her mind back to Patten's incompetence. For it suggested the
fountain pen which of old occupied the pencil's place and which the
sheriff had taken in his haste to secrete a bit of paper with Patten's
scrawl upon it. She wondered again just what had been on that paper,
and if it were meant to help Norton prove that Patten had no right to
the M.D. after his name? The incident, all but forgotten, remained
prominently in her mind, soon to assume a position of transcendent
importance.

And then, one after the other, here and there throughout the county
came fresh crimes which not only set men talking angrily but which drew
the eyes of the State and then of the neighboring States upon this
corner of the world. Newspapers in the cities commented variously,
most of them sweepingly condemning the county's sheriff for a
figurehead and a boy who should never have been given a man's place in
the sun. New faces were seen in San Juan, in Las Estrellas, Las
Palmas, Pozo, everywhere, and men said that the undesirable citizens of
the whole Southwest were flocking here where they might reap with
o