“Sure thing.  And I’m going alone.  Then they won’t make a fuss.  They’ll come back with me all right.”

“But you couldn’t get a jury to send one of ’em over—­not in this county.”

“Correct, Joe.  But the county’s paying me to go through the motions—­don’t matter what I think personally.  If they’ve pulled off a shooting-match at the water-hole, the thing’s settled by this time.  It had to come and if it’s over, I’m dam’ glad.  It’ll clear the air for quite a spell to come.”

“The papers’ll sure make a holler—­” began the deputy.

“Not so much as you think.  They got one good reason to keep still and that’s because the free range is like to be opened up to homesteaders any day.  Too much noise about cattle-and-sheep war would scare good money from coming to the State.  I heard the other day that that Sundown Jack picked up is settled at the water-hole.  I took him for a tenderfoot once.  I reckon he ain’t.  It’s hard to figure on those queer kind.  Well, you meet the two-thirty.  I guess I’ll ride over to the Concho and see the boys.”

The Loring-Corliss case is now a matter of record in the dusty files of the “Usher Sentinel” and its decidedly disesteemed contemporary, the “Mesa News.”  The case was dismissed for lack of anything like definite evidence, though Loring and Corliss were bound over to keep the peace.  Incidentally one tall and angular witness refused to testify, and was sentenced to pay a not insignificant fine for contempt of court.  That his fine was promptly paid by Corliss furnished a more or less gratuitous excuse for a wordy vilification of the rancher and his “hireling assassin,” “menace to public welfare,” and the like.  Sundown, however, stuck to his guns, even to the extent of searching out the editor of the “Mesa News” and offering graciously to engage in hand-to-hand combat, provided the editor, or what was left of him after the battle, would insert an apology in the next issue of the paper—­the apology to be dictated by Sundown.

The editor temporized by asking the indignant Sundown to frame the apology, which he did.  Then the wily autocrat of the “Mesa News,” after reading the apology, agreed to an armistice and mentioned the fact that it was a hot day.  Sundown intimated that he knew one or two places in Usher which he was not averse to visiting under the circumstances.  And so the treaty was ratified.

Perhaps among Sundown’s possessions there is none so cherished, speaking broadly, as a certain clipping from an Arizona newspaper in which the editor prints a strangely worded and colorful apology, above his personal signature, for having been misled temporarily in his estimation of a “certain person of warlike proclivities who visited our sanctum bent upon eradicating us in a physical sense.”  The apology follows.  In a separate paragraph, however, is this information: