o be rendered troublesome. She
could hear on all sides bitter curses openly directed against him. How
little of real manliness could be detected in these grinning or malignant
faces! Ill-formed, half-developed, bestial most of them, while others,
though weakly good-humored, were ready to go with whatever current of
strong passion blew upon them. Over against such creatures Ross Cavanagh
stood off in heroic contrast--a man with work to do, and doing it like a
patriot.

She went back to her own task with a vague sense of alarm. "Certainly they
will not dare to interfere with an officer in the discharge of his
duties," she thought. She was eager to see him, and the thought that he
might be obliged to ride away to Chauvenet without a word to her gave her
a deeper feeling of annoyance and unrest. That he was in any real danger
she could not believe.

It was disheartening to Cavanagh to see how some of the most influential
citizens contrived to give encouragement to the riotous element of the
town. A wink, a gesture, a careless word to the proper messenger, conveyed
to the saloon rounders an assurance of sympathy which inflamed their
resentment to the murderous point.

The truth is, this little village, sixty miles from the railway, still
retained in its dives and shanties the lingering miasma of the old-time
free-range barbarism. It trailed a dark history on its legal side as well
as on its openly violent side, for it had been one of the centres of the
Rustler's War, and one of the chief points of attack on the part of the
cattle-barons. It was still a rendezvous for desperate and shameless
characters--a place of derelicts, survivals of the days of deep drinking,
furious riding, and ready gun-play.

True, its famous desperadoes were now either dead or distantly occupied;
but the mantle of violence, the tradition of lawlessness, had fallen to
the seedy old cow-punchers and to the raw and vulgar youths from the
ill-conditioned homes of the middle West. The air of the reckless old-time
range still clung rancidly in the low groggeries, as a deadly gas hangs
about the lower levels of a mine. It was confessedly one of the worst
communities in the State.

"Let's run the sonovagun!" was the suggestion of several of Gregg's
friends.

The fact that the ranger was a commissioned officer of the law, and that
the ram's head had been found on the poacher's pack, made very little
difference to these irresponsible instigators to assa