The opinion of Lee’s aunt was in accord with the general sentiment.  Washington County had within the past year suffered a change of heart.  It had put behind its back the wild and reckless days of its youth when every man was a law to himself.  Bar-room orators talked virtuously of law and order.  They said it behooved the county to live down its evil reputation as the worst in the United States.  Times had changed.  The watchword now should be progress.  It ought no longer to be a recommendation to a man that he could bend a six-gun surer and quicker than other folks.  “Movers” in white-topped wagons were settling up the country.  A railroad had pushed in to Live-Oaks.  There was a lot of talk about Eastern capital becoming interested in irrigation and mining.  It was high time to remember that Live-Oaks and Los Portales were not now frontier camps, but young cities.

Since Live-Oaks had been good for so short a time it wanted to prove by a shining example how it abhorred the lawlessness of its youth.  At this inopportune moment Clanton gave himself up to be tried for the murder of Homer Webb.

When the news spread that Clanton had been given a change of venue and was to be tried at Santa Fe, the citizens of Live-Oaks were distinctly annoyed.  It was known that the sheriff had always been a good friend of the accused man.  The whisper passed that if he ever took Go-Get-’Em Jim out of the county the killer would be given a chance to escape.

Into town from the chaparral drifted the enemies Clanton had made during his career as a gunman.  Yankie and Albeen and Dumont and Bancock moved to and fro in the crowds at the different gambling places and saloons.  Even Roush, who in the past three years had never given young Clanton an opportunity to meet him face to face, stole furtively into the tendejons of the Mexican quarter and spent money freely in treating.  Among the natives Go-Get-’Em Jim was in ill-repute for shooting a bad man named Juan Ortez who had attempted to terrorize the town while on a spree.

“We’re spendin’ a lot of good money on this job.  We’d ought to pull it off,” Dumont whispered to Albeen.

“Whose money?” asked the one-armed man cynically.

It struck him as an ironic jest that the money they had got from the sale of Homer Webb’s cattle should be spent to bring about the lynching of the man who had killed him.

Both the sheriff and his deputy were out of town rounding up a half-breed Mexican who had stabbed another at a dance.  They reached Live-Oaks with their prisoner about the middle of the afternoon.  Lee was waiting for them impatiently at the court-house.

“They’re planning to lynch Jim,” she told Prince abruptly.

“Who’s goin’ to do all that?” he asked.

“The riff-raff of the county are back of it, but the worst of it is that they’ve got a lot of good people in with them.  Some of the Flying V Y riders are in town too.  I never saw so much drinking before.”