“I ain’t raggin’ yuh, Brick. knows, I’m for yuh. But it’s a cinch that there ain’t another man in Sun Dog County that can do more than you’ve done; but folks don’t stop to consider that part of it. Yo’re hired to catch criminals—so you’ve got to catch ’em, tha’sall.”
“Tha’sall,” nodded Brick seriously. “I remember when I was a little kid I had to recite a poem in school. It was somethin’ about Napoleon Bonaparte. It had a line like this—
“A very easy thing to plan, but difficult to do;
As Wellington made clear to him one day at Waterloo.”
“Or it might be kinda like the Frenchman’s flea-powder, in which the directions said, ‘First catch the little flea.’”
“Still, it might be a danged good thing for me and Brick, if he did get beat,” observed Harp. “Livin’ in the city this-a-way is plumb ruinin’ both of us.”
Brick grinned at his deputy, but the lanky one was serious. Marlin City was a city in name only. By virtue of its central location, it was the county-seat of Sun Dog County, but this honor had never caused it to advance beyond the small, cow-town stage.
It had one street, not too straight and not too long, bordered with unpainted buildings, which were mostly of the false-fronted style of architecture. The wooden sidewalks, four feet in width, oozed pitch in the Summer; and in the Winter the excessive cold caused the nails to snap out of the two-by-four girders, leaving the top-boards free to rattle and clatter underfoot, like walking over an unmusical xylophone.
Of shade-trees there was none. In fact, someone had said that there was only one tree between Marlin City and the North Pole. A branch line of the C. P. Railroad had recently been completed into Marlin City, giving them transportation for stock and mining products; but the advent of a railroad had not caused any perceptible boom in the country.