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 others of their ilk and go scot free.  Naturally, the Casa Blanca became headquarters for a large percentage of the newcomers.

“The condition in and about San Juan,” commented one of the most reputable and generally conservative of the attacking dailies, “has become acute, unprecedented for this time in our development.  The community has become the asylum of the lawless.  The authorities have shown themselves utterly unable to cope with the situation.  A well-known figure of the desert town who long ago should have gone to the gallows is daily growing bolder, attaching to himself the wildest of the insurging element, and is commonly looked upon as a crime dictator.  Unless there comes a stiffening in the moral fiber of the local officers, we dread to consider the logical outcome of these conditions.”

And so forth from countless quarters.  Galloway openly jeered at Norton.  New faces, looking out from the Casa Blanca, grinned widely as the sheriff now and then rode past.  Engle and Struve and Tom Cutter, anxious and beginning to be afraid of what lurked in the future, met at the hotel and sought to hit upon a solution of the problem.

“Norton has got something up his sleeve,” growled the hotel keeper, “and he’s as stubborn as a mule.  He’s after Galloway, and it begins to look as though he were forgetting that his job is to serve the county first and his own private quarrels next.  I’ve jawed him up and down; it only makes him shake his head like a horse with flies after him.”

The three, hoping that their combined arguments might have weight with Norton, went to him and did not leave him until they had made clear what their thoughts were, what the whole State was saying of him.  And, as Struve had predicted, he shook his head.