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Rh events which had happened around Martindale in the past fifty years, and he saw no difference between one generation and the next. In fact, he was not given to sifting evidence. With Uncle Jasper to manage his affairs he had had little to do with men and their ways, and his small contact with people in the blacksmith shop, outside of purely business dealings, had all gone to convince him that men near Martindale were a stark and terrible lot.

Was not Uncle Jasper himself continually dinning into his ears the terrible possibilities of trouble? Was not Uncle Jasper, even in his old age, when no one but a greaser would dream of lifting a hand against him, religiously exacting in his hour or more of gun exercise each day? Did not Uncle Jasper force Andy to go through the same maneuvers for twice as long between sunset and sunrise? And why all these precautions and endless preparations if these men of Martindale were not killers?

It might have occurred to Andy that no one had been killed in recent months, but it did not occur. He was thinking back to the stories of Jasper, when Martindale, through a period of one bloody six months, had averaged over two killings a day. That was in a period when a gold-rush population clogged the streets and bulged the saloons. But still Andy was unable to distinguish between past and present. It might seem strange that he could have lived so long among these people without knowing them better, but Andy had taken from his mother a little strain of shyness. He never opened his mind to other people, and they really never opened themselves to Andy Lanning. The men of Martindale wore guns, and the conclusion had always been apparent to