“Sheriff live this way?” shouted Matthews; for the roar of the little stream filled the canyon.

“Has a ranch at the foot of the Pass.”

“It won’t be wasting time, anyway,” said the old Britisher.

Again, Wayland smiled.  If it would not be wasting time; then, they were already in pursuit of the outlaws.  What was it in the insolent look of the Senator’s ranch hand that had suddenly dashed the doughty Briton’s reverence for the instrument of the law?

A barb wire fence tacked to spindly cottonwood trees marked the line of an irregular homestead; and the Ranger swung into a gate extemporized from barb wire on two adjustable posts.  Behind the gate, stood a log shack; on the windows, cheap lace curtains; behind the lace curtains, a vague movement of peeping faces and a querulous termagant voice:  “I ain’t a goin’ to have you mixed up in no scrap; so there, Dan Flood!”

Wayland dismounted and knocked on the door with his riding stock.  It opened on an anaemic sulphur face with blond hair screwed in curl papers over a full row of gold headlights where an enterprising dentist had engrafted as much of Klondike as possible.

“Sheriff Flood in?” the Ranger raised his hat.

“Oh, how j’ do, Mr. Wayland.”  All the curl papers nodded like clover tops in the wind, while the coy brows arched, and an inviting smile played round the simpering headlights.  “No, he ain’t!  Dan ain’t in!” The curl papers nodded again and the gold teeth simpered again.

“Is he—­home?” The word home came out with the force of a bullet.

“No, he ain’t home!  Mr. Flood ain’t home!  The sheriff was called ’way!  Is there any message?”

Wayland stood back and watched the fray.  The old man gazed full at the frowsy apparition in the doorway.  If dagger looks could have stabbed her, the lady would have dropped dead stuck full of as many daggers as a cushion is of pins.  The gold headlights suffered eclipse behind a pair of tightly perked lips; and one hand darted hold of the door knob.

“Yes,” he said, looking fixedly at the deep V of ash-colored skin where the lady had turned back the neck of her pink wrapper in imitation of gowns seen in the Sunday supplement of “The Smelter City Herald.”  “There was murder done on the Rim Rocks last night!  There’s festering bodies lying on top of yon Mesas!  ’Tis a job for the sheriff, not for an outsider—­”

“Yes, Sir,” said the gold headlights, “I think he’s gone to see about it.”

He had looked her slowly over again from the blondine hair and the ash-colored V of unclean skin and waistless slop of slattern wrapper to clock work stockings and high heeled slippers.

“A ha’ ma doubts he’s sprintin’ fr’ the back door this minute!  Are ye the sheriff’s—­woman?” and oddly enough the lady didn’t flush; but the faintest gloss came over the saffron skin—­of what?  It was the same nonchalant, wordless insolence that had played in the eyes of the man who had come out from the Senator’s ranch.