"Go ahead!" laughed Wolfe. "Hope you catch him."
"Startin' right now," replied Starnes. "Goo'-by!"
He hung up the receiver, rang off, crossed the room and took his broad-brimmed black hat from a nail that had been half driven up in the corner of a board lettered boldly: NO SWARING ALOUD. He buckled on a revolver-laden cartridge-belt, and took a pair of buckskin riding gloves from a drawer of his desk.
Just then there came a slow, heavy rapping at the door, the rapping of a rifle's butt.
The sheriff's lean face showed signs of annoyance. He went to the door. Two men stood a few feet from the steps. One of them was loosely-built, angular, and bullet-headed; the other was a big, square-chested man with sunburned black hair and beard. Only the big man was armed.
"You're the high sheriff o' this here county; hey?" said Alex Singleton.
"I am, sir."
"Then you arrest this here rattlesnake—take him off o' my hands afore I lose what little holt I've got on myself and put out his blasted light!" old Singleton roared. His voice was hoarse, rasping, like the sound a dull file makes when drawn across a thin steel edge. "He tried his best to kill a man I call my friend, Little Buck Wolfe; and the damned yaller dawg"—he was blind with rage, choking full—"he struck the one and only gyurl I've got——"
"And arrest him, too," Mayfield broke in desperately—"arrest him, too, fo'——"