A vision of himself trying to barter his mail-order package for a kiss flashed up before Pecos in lines of fire, but he shut his lips and sat silent. The exaltation and shame of that moment came back to him in a mighty pang of sorrow and he bowed his head on his arms. What if, in the fury of drink and passion, he had offered some insult to his Señorita—the girl who had crept unbeknown into his rough life and filled it with her smile! No further memory of that black night was seared into his clouded brain—the vision ended with the presentation of the package. What followed was confined only to the limitations of man's brutal whims. For a minute Pecos contemplated this wreck of all his hopes—then, from the abyss of his despair there rose a voice that cried for revenge. Revenge for his muddled brain, for the passion which came with drink: revenge for his girl, whom he had lost by some foolish drunken freak! He leapt to his feet in a fury.
"It's that dastard, Crit!" he cried, shaking his fists in the air. "He sold us his cussed whiskey—he sent us on our way! And now I'm goin' to git him!"
Angy gazed up at him questioningly and then raised a restraining hand.
"It's more than him, Cumrad," he said solemnly. "More than him! If Crit should die to-morrow the system would raise up another robber to take his place. It's the System, Pecos, the System—this here awful conspiracy of the capitalistic classes and the servile officers of the law—that keeps the poor man down. Worse, aye, worse than the Demon Rum, is the machinations which puts the power of government into the monopolistic hands of capital and bids the workingman earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. There is only one answer to the crime of government—the revolution!"
"Well, let 'er go then," cried Pecos, impulsively. "The revolution she is until the last card falls—but all the same I got my eye on Crit!"
CHAPTER IX
DEATH AND TAXES
THE iron hand of the law after hovering long above the Verde at last descended suddenly and with crushing force upon the unsuspecting cowmen. For a year Boone Morgan had been dallying around, even as other sheriffs had done before him, and the first fears of the wary mountain men had speedily been lulled into a feeling of false security. Then the fall round-ups came on and in the general scramble of that predatory period Morgan managed to scatter a posse of newly appointed deputies, disguised as cowboys, throughout the upper range. They returned and reported the tally at every branding and the next week every cowman on the Verde received notice that his taxes on so many head of cattle, corral count, were due and more than due. They were due for several years back but Mr. Boone Morgan, as deputy assessor, deputy tax-collector, and so forth, would give them a receipt in full upon the payment of the fiscal demand. This would have sounded technical in the mouth of an ordinary tax-collector but coming from a large, iron-gray gentleman with a six-shooter that had been through the war, it went. Upton paid; Crittenden paid; they all paid—all except Pecos Dalhart.