Briefly and concisely I told the colonel exactly what had happened.  He chewed his cigar, then spat it out with an unintelligible exclamation.

“Martin’s no worse than others,” he said.  “Blandy leans to crooked faro.  I’ve tried to stop that, anyway.  If Steele can, more power to him!”

Sampson turned on his heel then and left me with a queer feeling of surprise and pity.

He had surprised me before, but he had never roused the least sympathy.  It was probably that Sampson was indeed powerless, no matter what his position.

I had known men before who had become involved in crime, yet were too manly to sanction a crookedness they could not help.

Miss Sampson had been standing in her door.  I could tell she had heard; she looked agitated.  I knew she had been talking to her father.

“Russ, he hates the Ranger,” she said.  “That’s what I fear.  It’ll bring trouble on us.  Besides, like everybody here, he’s biased.  He can’t see anything good in Steele.  Yet he says:  ‘More power to him!’ I’m mystified, and, oh, I’m between two fires!”

* * * * *

Steele’s next noteworthy achievement was as new to me as it was strange to Linrock.  I heard a good deal about it from my acquaintances, some little from Steele, and the concluding incident I saw and heard myself.

Andy Vey was a broken-down rustler whose activity had ceased and who spent his time hanging on at the places frequented by younger and better men of his kind.  As he was a parasite, he was often thrown out of the dens.

Moreover, it was an open secret that he had been a rustler, and the men with whom he associated had not yet, to most of Linrock, become known as such.

One night Vey had been badly beaten in some back room of a saloon and carried out into a vacant lot and left there.  He lay there all that night and all the next day.  Probably he would have died there had not Steele happened along.

The Ranger gathered up the crippled rustler, took him home, attended to his wounds, nursed him, and in fact spent days in the little adobe house with him.

During this time I saw Steele twice, at night out in our rendezvous.  He had little to communicate, but was eager to hear when I had seen Jim Hoden, Morton, Wright, Sampson, and all I could tell about them, and the significance of things in town.

Andy Vey recovered, and it was my good fortune to be in the Hope So when he came in and addressed a crowd of gamesters there.

“Fellers,” he said, “I’m biddin’ good-by to them as was once my friends.  I’m leavin’ Linrock.  An’ I’m askin’ some of you to take thet good-by an’ a partin’ word to them as did me dirt.

“I ain’t a-goin’ to say if I’d crossed the trail of this Ranger years ago thet I’d of turned round an’ gone straight.  But mebbe I would—­mebbe.  There’s a hell of a lot a man doesn’t know till too late.  I’m old now, ready fer the bone pile, an’ it doesn’t matter.  But I’ve got a head on me yet, an’ I want to give a hunch to thet gang who done me.  An’ that hunch wants to go around an’ up to the big guns of Pecos.