Another week and he was close to forgetting Jimmie Clayton altogether.  The demands of the routine of range work kept him busy every day, early and late, and as though that were not enough to tax his endurance there came a fresh call upon him.

The stage had not been robbed that day he had seen it leaving Dry Town, and he had begun to persuade himself that the epidemic of crime from one end of the county to the other was at an end; that the highwayman had left the country while he could.  But now came news of fresh outlawry, news that ran from tongue to tongue of the angered cattle men and miners who demanded more and more loudly that Cole Dalton “get busy”.

Rumour flew back and forth, indignant, voluble, accusatory.  It stacked crime upon crime; it mouthed the names of many men whom the county would be glad to entertain in its empty jail, the names of the three Bedloe boys, of Black Dan, of Long Phil Granger, of certain newcomers to Hill’s Corners who, naturally, were to be looked upon with suspicion.  It listed the depredations committed during four weeks with a result that was startling.  It told of the theft of a herd of steers from Kemble’s place; the shooting of Bert Stone and the looting of Hap Smith’s mail bags; the robbery of Seth Powers who left the poker table at Gold Run at two o’clock one morning with seven hundred dollars in his overalls and was found at eight o’clock beaten into unconsciousness and with his pockets turned wrong-side out; the stage robbery in which Bill Varney of Twin Dry Diggings had been killed; the robbery of Jed Macintosh in Dry Town.  A hundred and fifty miles lay between the most widely removed of the places where these things had happened, but no two of them had occurred within a time too short for a man to ride from one to the other.

And now came the list of the bold crimes committed since the day, four weeks ago, when Buck Thornton had ridden into Dry Town with the five thousand dollars.  Kemble, to the westward of the Poison Hole, told of again losing cattle, seven big steers run off in a single night, nothing left of them but their tracks and the tracks of a horse which disappeared in the rocky mountain soil; Joe Lee, of the Figure Seven Bar, to the north of the Poison Hole, reported the loss of nine cows and two horses, all picked stock; Old Man King of the Bar X grew almost speechless with trembling wrath at the loss of at least a score of cattle.  And Ben Broderick, the mining man who was working his claim to the eastward of the Poison Hole, admitted quietly that a man, a big man wearing a bandana handkerchief as a mask, had slipped into his camp one night, covered him with a heavy calibre Colt, and had taken away with him a six hundred dollar can of dust.