Then I went into the next place.  This was of a rough crude exterior, but the inside was comparatively pretentious, and ablaze with lights.

It was full of men, coming and going—­a dusty-booted crowd that smelled of horses and smoke.

I sat down for a while, with wide eyes and open ears.  Then I hunted up a saloon, where most of the guests had been or were going.  I found a great square room lighted by six huge lamps, a bar at one side, and all the floor space taken up by tables and chairs.

This must have been the gambling resort mentioned in the Ranger’s letter to Captain Neal and the one rumored to be owned by the mayor of Linrock.  This was the only gambling place of any size in southern Texas in which I had noted the absence of Mexicans.  There was some card playing going on at this moment.

I stayed in there for a while, and knew that strangers were too common in Linrock to be conspicuous.  But I saw no man whom I could have taken for Steele.

Then I went out.

It had often been a boast of mine that I could not spend an hour in a strange town, or walk a block along a dark street, without having something happen out of the ordinary.

Mine was an experiencing nature.  Some people called this luck.  But it was my private opinion that things gravitated my way because I looked and listened for them.

However, upon the occasion of my first day and evening in Linrock it appeared, despite my vigilance and inquisitiveness, that here was to be an exception.

This thought came to me just before I reached the last lighted place in the block, a little dingy restaurant, out of which at the moment, a tall, dark form passed.  It disappeared in the gloom.  I saw a man sitting on the low steps, and another standing in the door.

“That was the fellow the whole town’s talkin’ about—­the Ranger,” said one man.

Like a shot I halted in the shadow, where I had not been seen.

“Sho!  Ain’t boardin’ heah, is he?” said the other.

“Yes.”

“Reckon he’ll hurt your business, Jim.”

The fellow called Jim emitted a mirthless laugh.  “Wal, he’s been all my business these days.  An’ he’s offered to rent that old ’dobe of mine just out of town.  You know, where I lived before movin’ in heah.  He’s goin’ to look at it to-morrow.”

“Lord! does he expect to stay?”

“Say so.  An’ if he ain’t a stayer I never seen none.  Nice, quiet, easy chap, but he just looks deep.”

“Aw, Jim, he can’t hang out heah.  He’s after some feller, that’s all.”

“I don’t know his game.  But he says he was heah for a while.  An’ he impressed me some.  Just now he says:  ‘Where does Sampson live?’ I asked him if he was goin’ to make a call on our mayor, an’ he says yes.  Then I told him how to go out to the ranch.  He went out, headed that way.”

“The hell he did!”