Certain male gossips who infested the groceries, pool-halls, and post-office of Sanborn, shook their heads and talked gravely about bribery and corruption and politics and what not, when they learned that the sheriff had actually bought a hat for that young outlaw that he was so mighty thick with.  “And it weren’t no fairy-story neither.  Bill Jennings sold the hat hisself, and the sheriff paid for it, and that young Annersley walked out of the store with said hat on his head.  Yes, sir!  Things looked mighty queer.”

“Things would ‘a’ looked a mighty sight queerer if he’d ‘a’ walked out with it on his foot,” suggested a friend of Owen’s who had been buttonholed and told the alarming news.

Meanwhile Pete attended to his own business, which was to get his few things together, pay his hotel-bill, settle his account with the sheriff—­which included cab-hire in El Paso—­and write a letter to Doris Gray—­the latter about the most difficult task he had ever faced.  He thought of making her some kind of present—­but his innate good sense cautioned him to forego that pleasure for a while, for in making her a present he might also make a mistake—­and Pete was becoming a bit cautious about making mistakes, even though he did think that that green velvet hat with a yellow feather, in the millinery store in Sanborn, was about the most high-toned ladies’ sky-piece that he had ever beheld.  Pete contented himself with buying a new Stetson for Sheriff Owen—­to be delivered after Pete had left town.

Next morning, long before the inhabitants of Sanborn had thrown back their blankets, Pete was saddling Blue Smoke, frankly amazed that the pony had shown no evidence of his erstwhile early-morning activities.  He wondered if the horse were sick.  Blue Smoke looked a bit fat, and his eye was dull—­but it was the dullness of resentment rather than of poor physical condition.  Well fed, and without exercise, Blue Smoke had become more or less logy, and he looked decidedly disinterested in life as Pete cautiously pulled up the front cinch.

“He’s too doggone quiet to suit me,” Pete told the stable-man.

“He’s thinkin’,” suggested that worthy facetiously.

“So am I,” asserted Pete, not at all facetiously.

Out in the street Pete “cheeked” Blue Smoke, and swung up quickly, expecting the pony to go to it, but Smoke merely turned his head and gazed at the livery with a sullen eye.

“He’s sad to leave his boardin’-house,”—­and Pete touched Smoke with the spur.  Smoke further surprised Pete by striking into a mild cow-trot, as they turned the corner and headed down the long road at the end of which glimmered the far brown spaces, slowly changing in color as the morning light ran slanting toward the west.

“Nothin’ to do but go,” reflected Pete, still a trifle suspicious of Blue Smoke’s gentlemanly behavior.  The sun felt warm to Pete’s back.  The rein-chains jingled softly.  The saddle creaked a rhythmic complaint of recent disuse.