“Ma’am,” said Tom Osby; “I used to think you had some sense.  You ain’t.”

“Why?”

“You can’t think of no way but States ways, can you?  I s’pose you think the police ought to catch a bad man, don’t you?”

“Well, it’s officer’s work, going after a dangerous man.  Wasn’t this man dangerous?”

He noted her eagerness, and hastened to qualify.  “Him?  The Kid?  No, I don’t mean him. He’s plumb gentle.  I mean a real bad man—­if there was any out here, you know.  Now, not havin’ any police, out here, the fellers that believes in law and order, why, onct in a while, they kind of help go after the fellers that don’t.  It works out all right.  Now I don’t seem to just remember which ones it was of our fellers that Stillson took with him the other day, along of your hurrying me out of town so soon after I got in.”

“It was Mr. Tomlinson, and Mr. McKinney from the ranch, you know; and Curly wanted to go, but they wouldn’t let him.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because he was a married man, they said.  And yet you say this criminal is not dangerous?”

“He’d ought to been glad to go, him a married man.  I’ve been married a good deal myself.  But was them two the only ones that went?”

“They two—­and Mr. Anderson.”

Tom smoked on quietly.  “Well, I don’t see why they’d take a tenderfoot like him,” he remarked at length, “while there was men like Curly standin’ around.”

“I thought you were his friend!” blazed the girl, her cheeks reddening.

Tom Osby grinned at the success of his subterfuge.

“If he wasn’t a good man, Ben Stillson wouldn’t ‘a’ took him along,” admitted he.

“Then it is dangerous?”

“Ma’am,” said Tom Osby, tapping his pipe against the side of the wagon seat, “they’re about even, a half dozen good ones against about that many bad ones.  They’re game on both sides, and got to be.  And we all know well enough that Dan Anderson’s game as the next one.  The boys figured that out the other night.  Why, he’ll come back all right in a few days; don’t worry none about that.”  He looked straight ahead of him, pretending not to notice the little gloved hand that stole toward his sleeve.  In her own way, Constance had discovered that she might depend upon this rough man of the plains.

“Ma’am,” he went on after a while, “not apropy of nothing, as they say in the novels, I wish you and your dad would hurry and get your old railroad through here.  Us folks may some of us want to go back to the States sometime, and it’s a long way to ride from Heart’s Desire to any railroad the way it is, unless you’ve got mighty good company, like I have, this trip.  I get awful lonesome sometimes, drivin’ between here and Vegas.  I had a parrot onct, and a phonygraph, as you may remember, but the fellers took ’em both away from me, you know.  I’m thinkin’