Tombstones!  That’s right; four marble beauties fresh from the cemetery.  Well, it made me right sore, for I’d helped to start Jonesville.  I was its city father.  I’d made the place fit to live in, and I aimed to keep it safe to die in, and so, bein’ a sort of left-handed, self-appointed deppity-sheriff, I rounded up those ghouls and drove ’em to the county-seat in my spring wagon.  I had the evidence propped up against the front of our real-estate office—­’Sacred to the Memory’ of four of our leading citizens—­so I jailed ’em.  But that’s all the good it did.”

“Couldn’t convict, eh?”

Blaze lit his cigarette for the third time.  “The prosecuting attorney and I wasn’t very good friends, seeing as how I’d had to kill his daddy, so he turned ’em loose.  I’m damned if those four Greasers didn’t beat me back to Jonesville.”  Blaze shook his head ruminatively.  “This was a hard country, those days.  There wasn’t but two honest men in this whole valley—­and the other one was a nigger.”

Dave Law’s duties as a Ranger rested lightly upon him; his instructions were vague, and he had a leisurely method of “working up” his evidence.  Since he knew that Blaze possessed a thorough knowledge of this section and its people, it was partly business which had brought him to the Jones home this afternoon.

Strictly speaking, Blaze was not a rancher, although many of his acres were under cultivation and he employed a sizable army of field-hands.  His disposition was too adventurous, his life had been too swift and varied, for him to remain interested in slow agricultural pursuits; therefore, he had speculated heavily in raw lands, and for several years past he had devoted his energies to a gigantic colonization scheme.  Originally Blaze had come to the Rio Grande valley as a stock-raiser, but the natural advantages of the country had appealed to his gambling instinct, and he had “gone broke” buying land.

He had located, some fifteen miles below the borders of Las Palmas, and there he had sunk a large fortune; then as a first step in his colonization project he had founded the town of Jonesville.  Next he had caused the branch line of the Frisco railroad to be extended until it linked his holdings with the main system, after which he had floated a big irrigation company; and now the feat of paying interest on its bonds and selling farms under the ditch to Northern people kept him fully occupied.  It was by no means a small operation in which he was engaged.  The venture had taken foresight, courage, infinite hard work; and Blaze was burdened with responsibilities that would have broken down a man of weaker fiber.

But his pet relaxation was reminiscence.  His own experience had been wide, he knew everybody in his part of the state, and although events in his telling were sometimes colored by his rich imagination, the information he could give was often of the greatest value—­as Dave Law knew.