“When that searching party finds their dead dogs and drinks up all their red liquor,” he reasoned to himself, “and come back to town and find those coons in jail, they’ll form a mob. My deputies will desert the crowd when the mob forms, but they won’t join me. It’s up to me to protect the coons.”
The town-clock struck two.
Far down the road, Sheriff Ulloa heard the piercing yell of the fox-hunter.
“They’re coming back,” he muttered.
Taking a large pistol from the holster under his arm, he examined it carefully, revolving the cylinder between his thumb and finger.
A tiny chameleon was playing up and down the bark of a tree twenty feet distant.
With a motion which appeared almost careless, Ulloa made a turn of his wrist, there was a loud explosion from the gun, and the little creature spattered into fragments, leaving a dark, wet spot against the tree which looked as if a man had spat at a hole in the bark and made a center shot.
The shot aroused the two negroes on the floor above, and the man-hunters heard it and hastened back to town.
When the party arrived in Kerlerac they quickly heard of the sheriff’s capture of the fugitives, but not a man came to the sheriff to ask him about the capture. They gathered in a body in the Red Elephant saloon.
Soon one of the deputies, white-faced and panting, ran into the sheriff’s presence with the news that a mob was forming on the outskirts of the town.