“Tell me how you met him, Jim,” requested Blake in the interval of silence. “I’ve heard some of it, second-handed, or third-handed, but I’d like to have it straight.”
“Well,” the sheriff continued, “when he came to these parts I didn’t know anything about him except what I had heard, which was only bad. He had a nasty way of handling his gun, a hair-trigger and a nervous finger on his gun, and he had a distressing way of using one cow to a meal, so I got busy. I didn’t expect much trouble in getting him. I knew that he was only a youngster and I counted on my fifty years, and most of them of experience, getting him. Being young, I reckoned he would be foolhardy and hasty and uncertain in his wisdom; but, Lord! it was just like trying to catch a flea in the dark. He was here, there and everywhere. While I was down south hunting along his trail he would be up north objecting to the sheep industry in ingenious ways and varying his bill of fare with choice cuts of lamb and mutton. And by the time I got down south he would be–God only knows where, I didn’t. I could only guess, and I guessed wrong until the last one. And then it was the toss of a coin that decided it.
“After a while he began to get more daring, and when I say more daring I mean an open game with no limit. He began to prove my ideas about his age making him reckless, though he was cautious enough, to be sure. One day, not long ago, he had a run-in with two sheepmen out by the U bend of the creek, who had driven their herds up on Cross Bar-8 land and over the dead-line established by the ranch. They must have taken him for some Cross Bar-8 puncher and thought he was going to kick up a fuss about the trespass, or else they recognized him. Anyway, when I got on the scene they were ready to be planted, which I did for them. Then I went after him on a plain trail north–and almost too plain to suit me, because it looked like it had been made plain as an invitation. He had picked out the softest ground and left plenty of good tracks. But I was some mad and didn’t care much what I run into. I thought he had driven the whole blasted herd of baa-baas over that high bank and into the creek, for the number of dead sheep was shore scandalous.
“I followed that cussed trail north, east, south, west and then all over the whole United States, it seemed to me. And it was always growing older, because I had to waste time in dodging chaparrals and things like that that might hold him and his gun. I went picking my way on a roundabout course past thickets of honey mesquite and cactus gardens, over alkali flats and everything else, and the more I fooled about the madder I got. I ain’t no real, genuine fool, and I’ve had some experience at trailing, but I had to confess that I was just a plain, ordinary monkey-on-a-stick when stacked up against a kid that was only about half my age, because suddenly the plainness of the trail disappeared and I was left out on the middle of a burning desert to guess the answer as best I could. I knew what he had done, all right, but that didn’t help me a whole lot. Did you ever trail anybody that used padded-leather footpads on his cayuse’s feet, and that went on a walk, picking out the hardest ground? No? Well, I have, and it’s no cinch.
“I got tired of chasing myself back to the same place four times out of five, and I reckons that it wouldn’t be very long before he had made his circle and got me in front of him. It ain’t no church fair to be hunting a mad devil like him under the best conditions, and it’s a whole lot less like one when he gets behind you doing the same thing. I didn’t know whether he had swung to the north or south, so I tossed up a coin and cried heads for north–and it was tails. I cut loose at a lope and had been riding for some time when I saw something through an opening in the chaparrals to the east of me, and it moved. I swung my glasses on it, and I’m blamed if it wasn’t an Apache war party bound north. They were about a mile to the east of me, and if they kept on going straight ahead they would run across my trail in about three hours, for it gradually worked their way. I ducked right then and there and struck west for a time, turning south again until I hit the Cimarron Trail, which I followed east. Well, as I went around one side of the chaparral six mad Apaches went around the other, and they hit my trail too soon to suit me. I heard a hair-raising yell and lit out in the direction of Chattanooga as hard as I could go, with a hungry chorus a mile behind me.
“I had just passed that freak bowlder on the Apache Trail when the man I was looking for turned up, and with the drop, of course. We reckoned that two was needed to stop the war-paints, which we did, him running the game and doing most of the playing. I felt like I was his honored guest whom he had invited to share in the festivities. He had plenty of chances to nail me if he wanted to, and he had chipped in on a game that he didn’t have to take cards in; and to help me out. He could have let them get me and they would have thought that I had done all the injury and that there wasn’t another man on the desert. But he didn’t, and I began to think he wasn’t as bad as he was painted.”
Then he told of the trouble between The Orphan and Jimmy of the Cross Bar-8, and of the rage which blossomed out on the ranch.
“That shore settled it for the Cross Bar-8. They wanted lots of gore, and they got it, all right, when he played five of their punchers against the very war party he had sent north to meet me, while I was chasing him. That war party must have found something to their liking, wandering about the country all that time.”
Blake interrupted him: “War party that he sent north to meet you?” he asked in surprise. “How could he do that?”
“That’s just what I said,” replied Shields, and then he explained about the arrow. “Any man who could stack a deck like that and use one danger to wipe out another ain’t going to get caught by an outfit of lunkheads–by George! if he didn’t work nearly the same trick on the Cross Bar-8 crowd! Oh, it’s great, simply great!”