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 He had come and gone without a glimpse of the marshal. If anybody had recognized him it hadn't caused a ripple in the town. He had not gone to Kane's resort, that being the kind of place he did not much frequent out of choice. Whether there were gun-slingers hanging around there to even Eddie Kane's score he did not know. Certainly he did not care greatly as he rode through the clear moonless night.

Tom was thinking and planning very much like any ordinary, healthy young man as he rode. He welcomed this turn of affairs that took him away from cow-camps and the rough adventures of that life. He had followed it for seven years almost without a break, not considering the job as mine guard in Colorado, his last employment before staking his savings on the real estate checkerboard in Kansas City. Like Waco Johnson's name, the pursuit of a cowboy's life never had brought him any luck. It was time, and good time, to make a change.

Perhaps fortune changed, as a man's body is said to change, every seven years. If so, the time was up for a revolution in his affairs. It looked promising. Tom roughly estimated how many cattle had perished along that little river running through the Ellison estate, during the winter kill, basing his calculations on what he had seen and what Mrs. Ellison had told him. He figured how many tons of bones lay waiting to his and Waco Johnson's hands, allowing so much weight to each of the skeletal remains. From the result he believed he and Waco could at least treble the ordinary cowboy wages between then and spring. If things came along well, they might even buy