“You’ll tell Doc Andover how it come out?”

“Of course.  He’ll want to know.  Take care of yourself.  Good-bye!”

Owen and his deputies strolled over to the station with the El Paso attorney.  Pete, standing out in front of the hotel, saw the train pull in and watched the attorney step aboard.

“First, Doc Andover says to hire a good lawyer, which I done, and good ones sure come high.”  Pete sighed heavily—­then grinned.  “Well, say two thousand—­jest like that!  Then the lawyer says to git a education.  Wonder if I was to git a education what the professor would be tellin’ me to do next.  Most like he’d be tellin’ me to learn preachin’ or somethin’.  Then if I was to git to be a preacher, I reckon all I could do next would be to go to heaven.  Shucks!  Arizona’s good enough for me.”

But Pete was not thinking of Arizona alone—­of the desert, the hills and the mesas, the canons and arroyos, the illimitable vistas and the color and vigor of that land.  Persistently there rose before his vision the trim, young figure of a nurse who had wonderful gray eyes . . .  “I’m sure goin’ loco,” he told himself.  “But I ain’t so loco that she’s goin’ to know it.”

“I suppose you’ll be hitting the trail over the hill right soon,” said Owen as he returned from the station and seated himself in one of the ample chairs on the hotel veranda.  “Have a cigar.”

Pete shook his head.

“They’re all right.  That El Paso lawyer smokes ’em.”

“They ought to be all right,” asserted Pete.

“Did he touch you pretty hard?”

“Oh, say two thousand, jest like that!”

The sheriff whistled.  “Shooting-scrapes come high.”

“Oh, I ain’t sore at him.  What makes me sore is this here law that sticks a fella up and takes his money—­makin’ him pay for somethin’ he never done.  A poor man would have a fine chance, fightin’ a rich man in court, now, wouldn’t he?”

“There’s something in that.  The Law, as it stands, is all right.”

“Mebby.  But she don’t stand any too steady when a poor man wants to fork her and ride out of trouble.  He’s got to have a morral full of grain to git her to stand—­and even then she’s like to pitch him if she gits a chanct.  I figure she’s a bronco that never was broke right.”

“Well,”—­and Owen smiled,—­“we got pitched this time.  We lost our case.”

“You kind o’ stepped up on the wrong side,” laughed Pete.

“I don’t know about that. Somebody killed Sam Brent.”

“I reckon they did.  But supposin’—­’speakin’ kind o’ offhand’—­that you had the fella—­and say I was witness, and swore the fella killed Brent in self-defense—­where would he git off?”

“That would depend entirely on his reputation—­and yours.”

“How about the reputation of the fella that was killed?”