They remonstrated with me and pleaded and scolded, all to little avail.  Then they were persuaded to take me seriously, to plan, providing I improved, to start in a few days.  We were to ride out of Pecos County together, back along the stage trail to civilization.  The look in Sally’s eyes decided my measure of improvement.  I could have started that very day and have borne up under any pain or distress.  Strange to see, too, how Steele and Diane responded to the stimulus of my idea, to the promise of what lay beyond the wild and barren hills!

He told me that day about the headlong flight of every lawless character out of Linrock, the very hour that Snecker and Wright and Sampson were known to have fallen.  Steele expressed deep feeling, almost mortification, that the credit of that final coup had gone to him, instead of me.  His denial and explanation had been only a few soundless words in the face of a grateful and clamorous populace that tried to reward him, to make him mayor of Linrock.  Sampson had made restitution in every case where he had personally gained at the loss of farmer or rancher; and the accumulation of years went far toward returning to Linrock what it had lost in a material way.  He had been a poor man when he boarded the stage for Sanderson, on his way out of Texas forever.

Not long afterward I heard Steele talking to Miss Sampson, in a deep and agitated voice.  “You must rise above this.  When I come upon you alone I see the shadow, the pain in your face.  How wonderfully this thing has turned out when it might have ruined you!  I expected it to ruin you.  Who, but that wild boy in there could have saved us all?  Diane, you have had cause for sorrow.  But your father is alive and will live it down.  Perhaps, back there in Louisiana, the dishonor will never be known.  Pecos County is far from your old home.  And even in San Antonio and Austin, a man’s evil repute means little.

“Then the line between a rustler and a rancher is hard to draw in these wild border days.  Rustling is stealing cattle, and I once heard a well-known rancher say that all rich cattlemen had done a little stealing.  Your father drifted out here, and like a good many others, he succeeded.  It’s perhaps just as well not to split hairs, to judge him by the law and morality of a civilized country.  Some way or other he drifted in with bad men.  Maybe a deal that was honest somehow tied his hands and started him in wrong.

“This matter of land, water, a few stray head of stock had to be decided out of court.  I’m sure in his case he never realized where he was drifting.  Then one thing led to another, until he was face to face with dealing that took on crooked form.  To protect himself he bound men to him.  And so the gang developed.  Many powerful gangs have developed that way out here.  He could not control them.  He became involved with them.

“And eventually their dealings became deliberately and boldly dishonest.  That meant the inevitable spilling of blood sooner or later, and so he grew into the leader because he was the strongest.  Whatever he is to be judged for I think he could have been infinitely worse.”