“Mm-m-m-m-m-mebby not, Judge. Damn it, I’m not any more stuck on things than you are! I don’t like hornets, but I don’t poke their nests.”
“In other words, you are not going to enforce Randall’s notices regarding carrying arms in town?”
“Well, I’m no fool, if that’s what you mean, Judge.”
The old judge nodded sadly. His was a forlorn cause, the cleaning up of Turquoise City. The sheriff, backed by a county judge, had made a half-hearted attempt to change conditions; but he had been virtually run out of town. He had resigned, taken his family and moved away, fearful of what might happen to him.
The old judge was sincere, drunkenly so most of the time, although in a dignified manner. That is, he was drunkenly dignified. Judge Beal had come of a good family and was well educated. He might have gone far in his chosen profession, except for his love of liquor; he had drifted into Turquoise City, when that place was in the throes of a mining fever, so he hung out his shingle and became the lawyer of Turquoise.
That was twenty years ago. His old shingle still hung outside of his office, but the lettering had long since faded. For five of those years he had been the county judge. He had seen Turquoise City in boom days, when men scrambled for raw gold; he had seen it gradually change after the days of the big strikes to a commonplace cow-town. When the railroad came along it boomed again, in a way. The railroad made it the shipping point of the valley, the logical shopping city for the surrounding range and for the mining district northeast of Turquoise. It was a busy county seat.
It had also become the gambling center of the country—the flesh-pot of the cowmen and miners. Turquoise City was unmoral rather than immoral. It was a wide-open town; business was good. Even if painted women did flaunt themselves on the streets, and an occasional cowpuncher decided to make the main street a bucking-chute, or shot at some one’s sign, it did not seem to hurt business. Many liked the wild excitement.
But to Judge Beal it was an offense to decent folks. He had persuaded Jim Randall, the sheriff, that something must be done, and they had started a two-handed crusade, which was doomed to fail, for Turquoise City did not want reform.
Jim Randall had received two warnings. The second one said:
There will be one more but you won’t see it, because it will come out of the dark.