After he put them in jail he caught a train for the capital. He didn't know why the Adjutant-General had called him and he didn't care because summer was just around the bend in the south and the Rio Grande country in the summertime was hot and cruel. The air was like the devil's own breath and the ground got hard and a man's feet stayed blistered all the time. Any kind of a job anywhere else was a picnic and Tom Bender liked picnics.
He was the issue of a frontier ancestry that had driven the Indians west of the Pecos to clear settlements for log cabins, a civilization of contrasts: hard, kind and tragic. The measure of an aristocrat was the nerve he had and the speed with which he could bark an Injun in his tracks and pitch a buffalo on his head with one ball.
Tom Bender's people were aristocrats and when they died that was all the heritage they left him.
That was enough.
When he hit Austin his body throbbed happily and he had a song in his heart for it was a passionate attraction he felt for the city. He swung along the street with the gait of a man to whom the feel of a pavement is a strange and mysterious thing, and everybody's eye was on him. They could tell by the walk of him that he was a fighting man and they knew by the brown of his face that he was from the south. Women looked at him but he paid no attention because he didn't know women could talk with their eyes...
He went straight to the capitol and entered a dim, musty office in the east wing. Doubled up in a swivel-chair behind a massive desk was the Adjutant-General, lean and limber, and smoking a cigar. He said: “Hello, Tom,” in a preoccupied tone but didn't get up or offer to shake hands.
There was a bluish haze hanging from the low ceiling, the office reeked with the smell of cigars and Tom Bender knew that when the smoke hung thick like this the Adjutant-General was getting ready to crawl somebody's frame. The thing to do was to let him alone and say nothing.
Bender sat down inelegantly in a Jacobean chair and waited. After a while he lighted a cigarette and as he began to puff the Adjutant-General said he had a trip for him and it was too bad he couldn't give it to somebody he didn't like. Bender asked him how was that and the Adjutant-General said it just looked like a hell of a way to reward him for getting those vaqueros.
Tom Bender laughed and said that was all right, the look on the Rinera sheriffs face was enough.
Then the Adjutant-General got up and stood by the desk. He looked down at the brim of Tom Bender's new white hat and said he was glad of that because he had a lulu now and he didn't mean maybe. Hell was popping over at Rondora. The old settlers had got enough of gangsters and gamblers and were about to take things into their own hands. The Adjutant-General said it was vigilante stuff.