Blaze seated himself with a grateful sigh where the breeze played over him.  He was a big, bearlike, swarthy man with the square-hewn, deep-lined face of a tragedian, and a head of long, curly hair which he wore parted in a line over his left ear.  Jones was a character, a local landmark.  This part of Texas had grown up with Blaze, and, inasmuch as he had sprung from a free race of pioneers, he possessed a splendid indifference to the artificial fads of dress and manners.  It was only since Paloma had attained her womanhood that he had been forced to fight down his deep-seated distrust of neckwear and store clothes and the like; but now that his daughter had definitely asserted her rights, he had acquired numerous unwelcome graces, and no longer ventured among strangers without the stamp of her approval upon his appearance.  Only at home did he maintain what he considered a manly independence of speech and habit.  To-day, therefore, found him in a favorite suit of baggy, wrinkled linen and with a week’s stubble of beard upon his chin.  He was so plainly an outdoor man that the air of erudition lent him by the pair of gold-rimmed spectacles owlishly perched upon his sunburned nose was strangely incongruous.

“So you’re a Ranger, and got notches on your gun.”  Blaze rolled and lit a tiny cigarette, scarcely larger than a wheat straw.  “Well, you’d ought to make a right able thief-catcher, Dave, only for your size—­you’re too long for a man and you ain’t long enough for a snake.  Still, I reckon a thief would have trouble getting out of your reach, and once you got close to him—­How many men have you killed?”

“Counting Mexicans?” Law inquired, with a smile.

“Hell!  Nobody counts them.”

“Not many.”

“That’s good.”  Blaze nodded and relit his cigarette, which he had permitted promptly to smolder out.  “The Force ain’t what it was.  Most of the boys nowadays join so they can ride a horse cross-lots, pack a pair of guns, and give rein to the predilections of a vicious ancestry.  They’re bad rams, most of ’em.”

“There aren’t many,” said Paloma.  “Dave tells me the whole Force has been cut down to sixteen.”

“That’s plenty,” her father averred.  “It’s like when Cap’n Bill McDonald was sent to stop a riot in Dallas.  He came to town alone, and when the citizens asked him where his men was, he said, ’Hell!  ‘Ain’t I enough?  There’s only one riot.’  Are you workin’ up a case, Dave?”

“Um-m—­yes!  People are missing a lot of stock hereabouts.”

“It’s these blamed refugees from the war!  A Mexican has to steal something or he gets run down and pore.  If it ain’t stock, it’s something else.  Why, one morning I rode into Jonesville in time to see four Greasers walkin’ down the main street with feed-sacks over their shoulders.  Each one of those gunnie’s had something long and flat and heavy in it, and I growed curious.  When I investigated, what d’you suppose I found?