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 with a gun from them. But when he lifted his voice and hand in defense of the rights of a clansman's daughter, that was enough to pass him into the iron circle of their highest confidence.

Texas did not realize this, for he was altogether too ingenuous to suspect that a community should reward a man for discharging a gentleman's obligations. He thought that Winch had hired him because he had proved himself handy with a gun against odds, or as a personal appreciation of the thrashing he had given the mayor.

In the two weeks that he had been riding trail, nothing had happened to break the autumnal peace. At morning he met at one end of his beat the man beyond him, and at evening the man from the other side. He was responsible only for the territory that he covered, a front of not more than ten or a dozen miles. Often a wave of the hand from a hilltop to tell that all was well was the only interchange between him and his comrades of the trail for days together.

Thus the time passed in monotonous loneliness, nothing to break it except now and then some traveler in covered wagon on his way from Kansas to Texas with his family, or somebody who had tried the lure of the South and was returning, thinner of shank and more tattered and roped together than when he left.