to live the only life
possible to one of his blood, had become manager of his father's ranch
in and beyond the San Juan mountains. At the time Billy Norton was the
county sheriff and had his hands full. Rumor said that he had promised
himself to "get" a certain man; Engle admitted that that man was Jim
Galloway of the Casa Blanca. But either Galloway or a tool of
Galloway's or some other man had "gotten" Billy Norton, shooting him
down in his own cabin and from the back, putting a shotgun charge of
buckshot into his brain.

It had occurred shortly after Roderick Norton's return, shortly before
the expiration of Billy Norton's term of office. Rod Norton, putting
another man in his place on the ranch, had buried his father and then
had asked of the county his election to the place made empty by his
father's death. Though he was young, men believed in him. The
election returns gave him his place by a crushing majority.

"And he has done good work," concluded Engle thoughtfully. "Because of
what he has done, because he does not make an arrest until he has his
evidence and then drives hard to a certain conviction, he has come to
be called Dead-sure Norton and to be respected everywhere, and feared
more than a little. Until now it has become virtually a two-man fight.
Rod Norton against Jim Galloway. . . ."

"John," interposed Mrs. Engle, "aren't you giving Virginia rather a
sombre side of things?"

"Maybe I am," he agreed. "But this killing of the Las Palmas man in
broad daylight has come pretty close to filling my mind. Who's going
to be next?" His eyes went swiftly toward the patio, taking stock of
the two figures there. Then he shrugged, went to the table for a cigar
and returned smiling to inform Virginia of life on the desert and in
the valleys beyond the mountains, of scattering attempts at reclamation
and irrigation, of how one made towns of sun-dried mud, of where the
adobe soil itself was found, drifted over with sand in the shade of the
cottonwoods.

But Mrs. Engle's sigh, while her husband spoke of black mud and straw,
testified that her thoughts still clung about those events and
possibilities which she herself had asked him to avoid; her eyes
wandered to the tall, rudely garbed figure dimly seen in the patio.
Virginia, recalling Jim Galloway as she had seen him on the stage,
heavy-bodied, narrow-hipped, masterful alike in carriage and the look
of the prominent eyes, glanced with Mrs. Engle tow