The little mule came to a stand at a bend in the switch back; and the old evangelist sat ruminating silently on his broncho.

“Y’ have a sheriff?”

Wayland laughed.

“He’s like the Indian flies; a no-see-him.  He’ll ride over the hills for weeks and if he tumbles over the top of his prisoner, he can’t find his man!”

The old Britisher looked doubtfully at Wayland, as much as to say, “I don’t believe you.”

“You’re no temptin’ me to take the law into our own hands?”

Again Wayland laughed.

“My dear sir, you don’t understand!  I don’t want to drag you into this at all!  For ten years, the powers that stand for law in this country have been marking time behind the firing line; while the other fellow got away with the goods.  They have been marking time while Crime scored, and what you call the Devil kept tally.”

The old man nodded his head approvingly.

“That’s all true!”

“You ask me if I intend to break the law?  No, Sir, I do not; but I do intend to carry the law out beyond the firing line.  The thief strains the law to get away with the goods; I am going to strain the law to get them back.  The murderer strains the law to protect his damned useless neck; I’m going to strain the law to break his neck.  Unless,” he added, “I break my own neck doing it.”

The old man had drawn down his brows.  “A don’t just like the sound of it; what’s your plan?”

“To go out with a gun till I get them; the way your own Mounted Police do up in Canada! I’m going to quit monkeying with technicalities in the twilight zone . . . and go out . . . after the man.”

The old Britisher sat thinking:  “Wayland, if A was managing this thing, first thing A’d do would be blow such a blast on your local press, the authorities would have to sit up, then—­A’d go after your sheriff if A had to tackle the coward by the scruff of his scurvy neck, A’d make him ashamed . . . not . . . to act.”

“All right, Sir!  Manage this thing . . . manage it just as you would behind your hide-bound British laws!  We’ll pass the Senator’s ranch in ten minutes.  You can telephone down to ‘The Smelter City Herald.’  I’ll get something ready to eat while you telephone.  Then, we’ll go right along to the sheriff.”

They kicked their ponies lightly into a trot and came to the Senator’s k’raal before the noon hour.  Two or three of the ranch hands loitered casually out to the road.  All were in blue over-alls and shirt sleeves but one; and he was in knickerbockers.

“That’s the foreman, ask him!”

“‘Twould oblige me t’ have the use of your telephone?”

The man in the knickerbockers tilted his hat at a rakish angle, stuck a tooth-pick in the corner of his mouth, put his thumbs in his jacket arm holes, shot Wayland a quick look of questioning, grinned at the old man and nodded towards a white pergola standing apart from the veranda of the ranch house.